The Fourth Year of the Case

Rows of chairs bolted to a rail, and a screen that has said the same thing for forty minutes, and his daughter has finished the book she brought and is doing the thing where she leans on him and pretends to be heavier than she is.

She was six when this started. She is ten.

That is the sentence he cannot get past today. Not the letter, not the phrase adjourned, not the woman who was kind and said there is nothing more she can do at this stage. That his daughter has grown a foot inside a waiting.

Four years.

His son does not remember before. That is a separate thing and it arrived one evening in the kitchen when the boy asked a question about their old flat as though it were a place from a story.

He is a careful man. He has a folder that is better organized than the office's. He has never once been late, never once been rude, never once raised his voice at anybody behind any counter, and he has been told twice by his own lawyer that his file is the tidiest she has.

And people say things. His pastor says God has a purpose in the waiting. A man in the same building says God is preparing something. Somebody at the school gate, who meant nothing but kindness, said everything happens for a reason.

He has stopped answering.

Not from anger. He is not an angry man. He has simply worked out that if he starts, the sentence that comes out will be one he cannot take back, and he needs the people in that building.

If you have been waiting long enough for children to grow inside it, you know those chairs. And you know the sentence underneath: I am tired of being told God is doing something in the delay, because the delay is not doing anything to me except taking years.

The word, and what Paul does not say

Let me sit two chairs down and say the plain thing, since we have forty minutes.

The problem is not the adjournment. You have had adjournments and you have a folder for them. The problem is that every kind person in your life has an explanation for your four years, and every explanation makes God the author of it, and you cannot say what you actually think about that without losing people you need.

So let me start with the word and then get to Paul.

Blessed does not mean the case resolves. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is a statement about where He is looking, and it is not readable off a Home Office timescale.

Now here is the passage they are all half quoting at you, and I want to read what it actually says.

And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.Romans 5:3-5

Read what it does and does not claim.

It says tribulation works patience. It does not say God sends tribulation in order to work patience. That is a different sentence and Paul does not write it, and the difference between those two is the difference between a God who is with you in a thing and a God who arranged the thing.

A fire warms a room. That does not mean the house burned down in order to warm you.

You are in something that is producing without being sent, and Paul never once says the sending. Romans 5:3 describes what tribulation works rather than who arranged it, and it is the Holy Spirit, named by name in verse five as the one pouring the love of God into a person, who is doing the actual work in that passage.

What patience is made of

Now the word patience, because in English it sounds like a temperament and in that verse it is not.

The word Paul uses means to remain under. It is a load bearing word. It describes something staying in place while weight is on it, and it has nothing to do with being calm about it.

So patience in Romans 5 is not the thing your pastor thinks it is. It is not you becoming a serener man over four years. It is you still being here, with a folder, at another hearing, with your daughter leaning on you.

Which means the thing that verse says is being produced has been produced, repeatedly, and you have not recognized it because you were looking for a feeling.

You have remained under something for four years, and remaining under is the entire content of the word in that verse. Romans 5:3 uses a word that means bearing up under a weight rather than accepting it graciously, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named in that same passage as the one poured out, so what has held is not your own temperament.

And then the chain goes on. Patience, experience. That word means tested and proved, the way metal is tested. And experience, hope.

Notice the direction. Hope comes last. It is not the fuel at the start of four years, it is what is left standing at the end of a stretch where a man found out what he is actually made of. Which is why the people telling you to have hope are getting the order backwards and it lands as pressure.

You have hope arriving at the end of the chain rather than being required at the start of it, and Paul puts it in that order deliberately. The written word runs tribulation to patience to proof to hope in sequence, and it is His Spirit who pours the love of God into the heart at the end of it, which is the thing that keeps hope from being embarrassment.

About the people who keep explaining it

Now them, because you need them and you cannot say it.

Your pastor is not being careless. He is doing what people do in the presence of a suffering they cannot fix, which is reach for a meaning, because a meaning makes it bearable for the person watching.

It does not make it bearable for the person in it. It usually makes it worse, because now you have to carry the thing and also manage somebody else's theology about it.

You do not have to correct any of them. Say thank you, which is what you have been doing, and keep the folder.

But do not accept the sentence internally, because that one does damage over years. Four years of your children's lives being described as God's teaching method is not a small thing to swallow, and swallowing it is how a careful man ends up quietly furious at God at about year six.

You are not being taught a lesson with your daughter's childhood, and nothing in Romans 5 says you are. Scripture describes what pressure produces without ever assigning it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is given, poured out, present, which is a completely different claim from a God who scheduled your adjournments.

I do not know when this ends. I have no idea and I am not going to guess, and you have had four years of confident people. Keep the lawyer. Keep the folder. If there is a case worker or an advice service or an MP's surgery you have not used, use it this month.