The Child We Waited For and Did Not Have

They stopped in February. That is the only word either of them has used for it.

Not gave up. Not failed. Stopped. There was a conversation in a car outside a clinic that took about four minutes and neither of them raised their voice and both of them already knew.

Nine years.

The folder is in a drawer in that study. It is thick. There are letters in it from three different places, and a printout of a calendar with dates circled that meant something to two people and nothing at all to anybody else on this earth, and there are two scans in there from the one time it went further than usual, in 2019, for eleven days.

And there is a name.

They chose it in the second year, half joking, in a kitchen, and it stopped being half joking somewhere around the fourth year, and neither of them has said it out loud to another human being ever.

Here is where they are now, seven months on.

His mother thinks it is a shame and has said so once and will not raise it again. Their friends, who are kind, have mostly stopped asking, which was a mercy at first and is now its own kind of quiet. Somebody at synagogue said, warmly, that they still had time, which they do not, and it was not the moment to explain that.

And nobody, not one person in nine years, has said the word loss.

Because what was lost? Nobody died. Nothing was taken away that anybody could point to. There is no name on anything, no date, no service, no notice, nothing that would tell an outside observer that anything at all had happened in that house.

Except that both of them are grieving a person. A specific one. With a name. Who was as real to them as a room they walked past every day for nine years and never entered.

If either of you has sat in a study looking at a drawer like that, stay with me. There is a verse in the first chapter of Samuel that meets a woman exactly where she was, and I want to be careful with it, because it is normally handled badly.

Hannah answers a false accusation with the truth and is received

Here is the verse, and it is a reply, which matters.

And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD.1 Samuel 1:15

She had just been accused of being drunk, by the priest, in the house of God, while praying.

And she does not defend her dignity. She does not argue about the accusation for very long. She names herself: I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit. And then she describes what she was doing, and the description is not a formula. She was pouring out her soul.

That is the whole prayer being described. Not a request properly phrased. Not faith correctly exercised. A soul emptied out in front of God with no shape to it.

And she is received. Eli, who had it completely wrong a moment earlier, stops, and blesses her, and she goes her way.

You are received by God in exactly that condition, and you were received in that condition through all nine years and every one of the seven months since. 1 Samuel 1:15 is the written word putting a soul poured out with no proper form to it in front of God and having it accepted, and the Spirit who inspired that page is in a study at night with a lamp on and a folder in a drawer.

Now let me say the thing about that chapter that has to be said, because this is where people go wrong with it and it does real damage.

Hannah's story ends with a child. Everybody knows that. And that is exactly why this passage gets handed to people in this situation, and it is handed over as a promise: hold on, keep praying, look what happened to her.

I am not going to do that. God did not put that chapter in the Bible to be used as a guarantee about anybody else's house, and using it that way makes a woman's specific history into a debt God now owes to strangers.

What that chapter actually gives, and it gives it permanently, is verse fifteen. A sorrowful spirit, poured out, received.

You have the receiving from that chapter, and you were never handed a promise out of it that God did not make. 1 Samuel 1:15 records the pouring out and the reception of it, and the Holy Spirit does not require a hopeful ending before He will take what a person brings.

He was real, and there is nothing confused about grieving him

Now let me say the thing that neither of them has been able to say to anybody, and say it plainly.

They are grieving a person who never existed.

That sentence sounds, on its face, like a description of something irrational. It is not. It is an accurate description of what happens to human beings who spend nine years preparing a life with a specific space in it.

What was real, and is now gone, includes: a name chosen in a kitchen. A room that has been a study for nine years and was always going to be something else. A version of their fifties. A whole imagined relationship, with a face, that both of them privately assembled and never fully described to each other. Eleven days in 2019.

Those are not fantasies that a sensible person would have avoided having. That is what hope looks like from the inside. Nobody waits nine years for something abstract.

And when it stops, all of that stops, and every bit of it was real enough to be lost.

You are grieving something that genuinely existed in you, and you were building it in good faith for the whole nine years. Proverbs 13:12 says hope deferred maketh the heart sick, which is God's own acknowledgment that waiting does a real thing to a real person, and the Spirit of God does not call a grief confused because its object never drew breath.

God counts what has no name on any document

Now the thing this site exists to say.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

There is no threshold. There is no qualifying event, no certificate, no date, no announcement.

And notice that the counting is of wanderings, which is the word for a life spent moving between places without arriving. Nine years of appointments is a wandering. Nine years of a circled calendar is a wandering.

So the four minutes in a car outside a clinic in February are counted. The name chosen in a kitchen is counted. The eleven days in 2019 are counted. The seven months of a friend not asking are counted.

And the name, which has never once been spoken to another human being, is known.

You are keeping a grief that God has already entered into His own book, and you were counted through every year that nobody had a word for any of it. Psalm 56:8 has the wanderings told and the tears bottled with no question asked about whether the loss qualifies, and the Holy Spirit does not sort a household's grief into the parts He will count and the parts He will not.