Nine Minutes in the Cereal Aisle

The light in that aisle is the flat white kind that makes everybody look tired, and the floor has been mopped, and there is a stock cart parked at the far end with somebody's radio going quietly on it.

She has been standing here nine minutes.

She knows it is nine because she looked at the clock on the register display when she came around the corner and she looked again just now. Nine minutes in front of the cereal. Not comparing prices. Not reading labels. Standing, with one hand on the cart, in front of forty boxes, unable to pick one.

For nineteen years the list was in someone else's handwriting. Every week. What went in the cart was decided before she left the house, and if she came home with something not on it there was a conversation about it, and after a few years there stopped being a reason to bring anything home that was not on the list. It was not dramatic. Nothing in it would sound like much if she described it at a table. It was just that for nineteen years the question what do you want was not a question anybody was asking, and eventually it was not a question she was asking either.

That ended two years ago. Not by her decision. He made his choices and there was a Tuesday when the house was different and it has been different since.

Two years. She has a job and a lease in her own name and a car she picked herself, which took eleven days and two trips back to the lot. And here she is on a Thursday evening, thirty-four dollars in the cart, standing in front of cereal like the boxes are an exam.

And the thing rising in her is not sadness. It is fury, and it is aimed at herself. Two years. Two whole years, and this. She had assumed, without ever saying it out loud, that by now she would be a person who walks down an aisle and puts a box in a cart. That she would be done. That two years was enough time for a person to be given back.

She picks one up. Puts it back. Somebody says excuse me and reaches past her for the oatmeal.

You have your own aisle. Yours might be a phone call you cannot make, a menu you cannot order from, a door you stand outside of for a while before you go in. Somewhere the restoration is unmistakably real and unmistakably not finished, and you had a private schedule for it that has quietly expired, and the anger about that is aimed straight at yourself. You are not behind, and the pace of this was never yours to set. It is written in Exodus 23:30 that God gives ground back little by little, and it is the Holy Spirit who is doing that in you at a speed you did not choose and are not failing to keep up with.

The reason is inside the verse

Most verses about waiting make you supply the reason yourself. This one gives it to you in the same sentence.

Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land.Exodus 23:30

Read the line before it, because that is where God explains Himself. He says He is not going to do it in one year, and He gives the reason: otherwise the land would become desolate and the wild animals would multiply against them. Meaning, if He handed a small, exhausted people a whole country in twelve months, they could not hold it. The fields would go back to bush. The empty towns would fill with what empty places fill with. The gift would eat them.

So the slowness is not God being slow. The slowness is the size of the gift being matched to the size of the hands. He is not withholding the land. He is giving it at the rate a person can actually take possession of it, and possession, not delivery, is the point of the verse.

You are being given back your own life at the speed that lets you keep hold of it. Exodus 23:30 says so in the same breath as the promise, and it is the Holy Spirit who is measuring that pace to a person and not to a calendar, which is why yours does not match anybody else's and was never supposed to.

Nine minutes in front of the cereal is not a person failing at restoration. It is a woman being handed back a muscle that was not used for nineteen years, and using it badly, in public, under bad lighting, which is the only way anybody ever gets it back.

Slow is not stalled, and unnoticed is not nothing

Here is the part that has to be said carefully, because two things are true and people usually keep only one.

The first is that slow is not stalled. A restoration that has not finished is not a restoration that stopped. The work in Exodus was going on in every one of those years, in the seasons when nothing visible happened and the border did not move. Nobody was standing on a hill watching progress. It was happening.

The second is harder. There will be stretches where you notice nothing at all, and I am not going to tell you that noticing nothing means nothing is happening. That is exactly backwards on this ground. The parts of a person that come back last are the ones that come back below the waterline: the appetite for your own opinion, the reflex that used to scan a room, the pause before you apologize for something that was not yours. Those do not announce themselves. You find out about them a year later, by accident, in an aisle, when you realize you are annoyed instead of afraid.

You have real ground under you in seasons when you can measure absolutely nothing, because it is written that the giving is little by little, and little by little includes the parts too little to see, and the Holy Spirit is not keeping His work in a place where your mood can audit it on a Thursday.

And I am not going to promise you it speeds up, and I am not going to hand you a technique for making it go faster. There is nothing in the verse about the people hurrying it, and there is nothing in it about them slowing it down either. The pace belongs to God. Anybody selling you an accelerator on this ground is selling you a way to blame yourself when it does not work.

Restored is not the same word as replaced, either. Nobody is installing a factory version of you who decides quickly. Replaced would be a different woman with your name on her, and she would not have the nineteen years in her, and the nineteen years are part of what God is redeeming rather than deleting. Restored means the woman who could not be asked what she wanted learns, slowly, in bad light, that the question is hers to answer.