The Letter Heaven Is Writing Over You

My grandmother wrote letters her whole life, and she had a habit that used to drive me a little crazy as a girl. She would never let me read one until it was finished. I would lean over her shoulder at the kitchen table, catch a half-sentence trailing off into nothing, and ask what it meant — and she would cover the page with her hand and say, Wait. It isn't done yet. You'll misunderstand it if you read it now.

I thought she was just being secretive. It took me almost forty years to understand she was teaching me something about hope.

The middle always looks like an ending

I have been discouraged this year in a way I don't say out loud very often. Not the dramatic kind of despair, just the slow kind — the sense that the story I'm living has stalled on a page where nothing good is happening, and that maybe this is simply how it ends. Quietly. Unfinished. A little less than I'd hoped.

And I caught myself doing exactly what my grandmother warned against. I was reading my own life in the middle and mistaking the middle for the conclusion.

Because that's the thing about middles — they always look like endings when you're standing inside them. The hardest chapter of any story, if you froze it right there and read no further, would seem like a tragedy. The hero is in the dark. The door is locked. Nothing has been resolved. If that were the final page, you'd close the book in sorrow. But it is not the final page. It is only the place where you happen to be reading.

You are not a finished story being judged. You are a sentence still being written, by a hand that has never once abandoned a page midway.

What I forget when I'm discouraged

When the discouragement is loudest, here is what I forget: I cannot see the whole letter. I can see this line — this difficult, unresolved, painful line — and from where I sit it seems to go nowhere. But I am not the author. I am the one being written about, and the One holding the pen knows how every clause connects to the next, knows which apparent dead end is actually a turn, knows that the part I'm calling wasted was the part where something essential was being formed in me that no easier chapter could have formed.

I think of all the people in the old stories who were stuck in their middles. The ones who waited years. The ones forgotten in prisons and pastures and back rooms, certain their best pages were behind them. Not one of them could see, in the moment, what was being written. And not one of their stories ended where the discouragement told them it would.

That used to feel like a nice idea. Lately it has started to feel like a lifeline.

Your story is not finished

So let me say to you what I have had to keep saying to myself, sometimes through tears, sometimes just stubbornly, the way you repeat a true thing until your heart catches up to it: your story is not finished. The discouragement is real, but it is not the narrator. It is only a voice in one chapter, and it is a voice that has always been wrong about how things end.

The letter Heaven is writing over you is not a short one. It is patient. It does not rush to a conclusion just because you are tired of waiting in the middle. And it is being written with a tenderness toward you that you would scarcely believe if you could read it now — which is, I suspect, exactly why you can't read it yet. You would misunderstand it. You'd take the unfinished line and assume the worst, when the whole point is that it isn't finished.

If you knew the rest of it, I don't think you would be afraid tonight. I think you would be astonished. I think you would put your hand over your mouth at how much was being woven through the very season you wanted to skip.

So stay on the page. Don't close the book here. The fact that you cannot yet see how this resolves is not evidence that it won't — it is only evidence that you are still in the middle, where every middle has always looked exactly this uncertain to everyone who has ever lived through one.

Wait. It isn't done yet. And the One writing it has never, not once, set down the pen.

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