The Box I Have Not Thrown Away

It is a banana box and it is under the water tank and Denise has not opened it in seventeen years.

She goes up there maybe four times a year. Christmas things, the suitcase, the fan in July. And every single time, without exception, she does the same ten seconds.

She sees the corner of it. She looks at it. She thinks I really ought to deal with that. And then she gets what she came for and goes back down and does not think about it again until the next time.

Seventeen years. Call it seventy visits.

She could not tell you exactly what is in it. Papers, some of them. Photographs, definitely. Some things belonging to a person she has not spoken to since 2008 and does not intend to. There is nothing dangerous in there and nothing valuable and if the house flooded tomorrow she would not grieve it.

Which is the confusing part.

She cannot open it. She has tried twice, once with a friend in the house on purpose, and got as far as putting a hand on it.

And she cannot throw it away. She has had two clear-outs in seventeen years, ruthless ones, and both times the box went back under the tank.

So it sits there, and four times a year it takes ten seconds off her, and she has never once put those two facts together into a number.

She is sixty-one.

You may have your own box.

Maybe it is in a loft, or a drawer, or a folder on a computer with a name that means nothing to anybody else. And you cannot look and you cannot bin it, and every so often it takes ten seconds.

I am not going to tell you what to do with it

Let me get this out of the way, because it is the advice you are braced for and I am not giving it.

I am not going to tell you to burn it. That is the dramatic answer and it makes for a satisfying paragraph and it would be me deciding something about your life from a considerable distance.

I am also not going to tell you to open it. Not with a friend, not on a good day, not as an exercise. If there is ever a right time for that it will be yours to know, and possibly with somebody who is trained, and it will not be because a message on a screen suggested it.

And I am certainly not going to tell you that keeping it means you have not let go. Getting rid of an object is not the same as burial and pretending otherwise is how people end up doing something drastic and feeling exactly the same on Tuesday.

The box is not the question. The ten seconds are the question.

What is actually true of you now

There is a sentence in Galatians where Paul states something about himself, and it has two halves and people usually only quote one.

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God.Galatians 2:20

Nevertheless I live.

That is the half that matters here. He does not say I am crucified with Christ, and that is the last thing to report. He puts a death and a life in one sentence, and the life is the one in the present tense, and it is described as ongoing and current and happening in the flesh, which means in the ordinary body doing ordinary things.

The crucified part is settled. The living part is now.

And what is true of you now is the living half of that sentence. The written word puts the death in the completed tense and the life in the present, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman standing at the bottom of a loft ladder.

And you are not defined by what is under a water tank. The word says not I, but Christ liveth in me, which relocates the whole question of identity, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than taking an inventory.

What the ten seconds are

Now let me name what I think is actually happening in those ten seconds, because I do not think it is guilt.

It is unfinished business. Or rather, it is the feeling of unfinished business, which is not the same thing, and it is one of the most durable feelings there is.

Something in you registers the box as an open item. Not a threat, not a shame, an open item, the way a form you never sent back sits in a person's mind for years.

And an open item generates a small tax every time it comes into view, and the tax has been running four times a year since 2008.

The relief you are looking for is not from the contents. It is from the openness.

And nothing about your life is pending. The word says he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it, which makes the file His and the completing His, and the Spirit is the one who closes what a person cannot close from the top of a ladder.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has been faintly reproaching herself four times a year for seventeen years.