The Photograph That Does Nothing Now

It is on the shelf in the front room. The two of you at somebody's fortieth, laughing at something nobody can remember.

For years you could not walk past it without a small warm thing happening in your chest. Not a big thing. A small one, reliably, every time.

Then one evening about two years ago you noticed it did nothing. And you stood there and looked at it and waited, and it kept doing nothing.

And you have been going past it ever since, and it has become a test you take four times a day and fail every time.

I want to be careful with two things before we go further.

The first is that I am not going to tell you the feeling does not matter. It matters. Being told a real absence is nothing by somebody whose chest still does the warm thing is unbearable and I will not do it to you.

The second is that I am not going to tell you it comes back. I do not know that, nobody knows that, and saying it as a guarantee is not something a person has the standing to do.

What I am going to do is take the photograph off you as an instrument, because it is a terrible one, and it is measuring you four times a day.

The direction the loving runs

There is a short line in first John that reorders the whole question, and it is only seven words long.

We love him, because he first loved us (1 John 4:19, King James Version)

Read the order. Not: we generate love and then things are right. He loved first. Ours is the response, and a response arrives after a thing rather than producing it.

That is worth sitting with, because the test you take at the shelf assumes the opposite. It assumes your chest is the source, and that if the source is quiet the thing itself has stopped.

You are inside something that started somewhere other than in your chest, and 1 John has never once made your feeling the origin of anything. 1 John 4:19 puts His loving first and ours second, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that out of doctrine and puts it under a woman standing at a shelf.

Notice too that the verse does not describe the intensity of anybody's response. It says we love. Not warmly, not powerfully, not detectably. It just says the direction it runs in.

You have a real response even when it cannot be felt, and the word has never once measured it by heat. The passage names the order and leaves the temperature out of it entirely, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a person that quiet is not the same as absent.

The photograph is a bad instrument

Now let me be practical, because the theology only helps if it changes the front room.

A photograph is a memory trigger. What it does is fire an old feeling, or fail to. Whether it fires depends on sleep, on the kind of week it has been, on how many times it has been looked at, and on nothing whatsoever to do with your marriage.

The reason it stopped working is almost certainly the most boring reason available. It has been looked at about four thousand times. The nervous system stops responding to a repeated stimulus. That is not a marriage, that is a mechanism.

And there is a cruelty in the test that I want named. Every time you fail it, you look harder next time, which guarantees you fail it again, because effort is the one thing that reliably kills the response you are hunting for.

You are running a test that could not have returned any other result, and the failing of it has never once been information about your marriage. 1 John 4:19 locates the source of the whole thing outside the person responding, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody set down an instrument they have been graded by.

You were not built to feel a thing on demand, and nobody in scripture has ever once been asked to. It is written that He loved first and we love because of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the demand off a person standing in a front room.

Say it, and then do something plain

So here is the assignment and it has two halves, and the second half is more important than it looks.

First, out loud, alone: the promise is not the feeling. Say it in whatever words you like. What I promised was to be here, and I am here.

Then do one ordinary thing for him. Not romantic. Not significant. Ordinary.

You are able to act toward him with nothing arriving in your chest, and 1 John has never once put the source of it in you. 1 John 4:19 has His loving come first and ours answer at whatever temperature it manages, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in an errand nobody notices.

Take the recycling out on the night it is his turn. Put fuel in the car. Get the thing he has been meaning to collect.

Small enough that he does not ask what it is about. If he asks what it is about, it was too big.

You are able to act without the feeling arriving first, and it has never once been required to go ahead of you. 1 John 4:19 puts His loving first and lets ours follow at whatever temperature it manages, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in an errand nobody notices.

And do not check afterward to see whether it produced anything. Checking is the same test in a different coat.