I Learned the Room by Hand

Four tiles from the stove to the sink. She counted them the first month and she has never once had to count them since.

The third drawer sticks, so you lift it half an inch as you pull. The cinnamon lives front left in the spice rack because December is the month she reaches for it most and she wanted it where her hand would go without being asked. The pot lids are stacked biggest to smallest and the one with the loose knob is on the bottom where it cannot fall. The kettle handle is turned to eleven o'clock, always, and if anyone moves it she knows before she has finished reaching, the way you know a stair is missing before your foot arrives.

She learned this room by hand over three years, and now she cooks in it for eleven people at Christmas.

That is not the story. That is the wallpaper on the story.

The story is a photograph on the hallway wall that she has never seen and will not see, from her son's wedding, which happened after. People describe it to her. Her daughter-in-law is laughing in it and there is a hand blurred at the edge of the frame that belongs to somebody nobody can identify, and it has become a family joke, and she laughs at the joke and means it.

And there is a granddaughter, four years old, whose face she knows entirely by hand: the round of the cheek, the specific weight of her head when she falls asleep against a shoulder, a scar on the eyebrow from the coffee table. And by voice. Mostly by voice. That child's voice goes up at the end of a sentence even when it is not a question, and it is the single most familiar sound in her world, and she has no idea what the face doing it looks like.

That is the ache and it does not move. She has made her peace with the tiles and the drawer and the kettle handle. She has not made her peace with the fact that the two faces she most wanted are the two she got last, and got only in her hands and her ears, and will keep that way.

What she wants is not another article about a miracle that is coming. She has had those. What she wants is for somebody to talk to her as a whole person while she is like this, and not as a woman in a waiting position.

You know this kitchen. Maybe it is not sight. Maybe it is a body, a marriage, a mind, a name, a country, something that was taken and did not come back and is not coming back, and people keep addressing you as though your real life resumes when it returns. You are a whole person right now, in this room, in this body, and not one in a waiting position. 2 Corinthians 5:7 puts you inside the same sentence as everybody else, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been keeping company with you between the stove and the sink for three years.

The verse is not about your eyes

Somebody has quoted this at you. Probably more than once, probably with a particular gentle voice on, and I am going to hand it back to you the right way up.

For we walk by faith, not by sight.2 Corinthians 5:7

Look at the first word. We. Paul is writing to a whole church, and every last person in it has working eyes, and he tells all of them, together, that this is not what they are walking by. Sighted people, in a room, being told they are not going by what they can see.

Which means this verse was never a consolation invented for you. It is not the special provision made for the blind, handed down the line to the person who cannot join in the ordinary way. It is the ordinary way. It is the condition of every believer alive, and you did not enter a lesser category when the sight went; you found out early and in your body what everybody else in that church was being asked to learn on purpose.

And I want to be careful in the other direction too, because this is where people get careless with you. Scripture never calls blindness a good thing. Jesus healed blind men, He did not lecture them on the advantages, and nothing in the Bible asks you to be pleased about it. You are allowed to want your sight. You are allowed to want it today, in the kitchen, out loud, and no part of that makes you a poor example of anything.

You have the whole of this verse and not a special reduced portion of it. It is written in 2 Corinthians 5:7 that walking by faith is what all of us are doing, and it is the same Spirit in you as in every other believer who ever put a foot down without seeing where it landed.

Whole is not the same word as intact

So now the thing this site was built to say, in the category where it costs the most.

Restored is not replaced. And I will go further here, because this category does not get to blink. The sight is not coming back in this article. I am not going to hint at it, I am not going to leave a door open at the end for you to hear a hint in, and I am not going to tell you a story about somebody whose came back so that you can lie awake doing arithmetic with it. Your eyes are not a cliffhanger.

Whole is not the same word as intact. Intact means nothing has been taken. Nobody past a certain age is intact and everybody past a certain age knows it. Whole means the person is not in pieces, is not on hold, is not a draft of themselves waiting for the real version to be issued.

And God is doing that now. Not after. Not in the version of your life where the photograph gets seen. Now, in the three years, in the kitchen, at the same time as the loss and in the same body as the loss, which is the only place He has ever done any of this for anybody.

You are being made whole in the middle of the thing, and not on the other side of it. Scripture is plain in 2 Corinthians 5:7 that the walking happens without the seeing, and it is the Holy Spirit doing the restoring, at His pace, with nothing about your eyes required first.

And your grief over those two faces is not on trial here. It is not unbelief, it is not a bad attitude, it is not a thing to be prayed out of you. You lost something enormous. Grief is what love does when something is taken, and if anybody has suggested to you that a stronger Christian would be over it by now, that person was mistaken and you may put their sentence down.