Choosing Means Letting Myself Want This

She has not started.

That is the thing she says, and it is true in a technical sense. There is no list. There is no folder. When people ask, she says there is plenty of time, and there is not really, and everybody has stopped noticing that she never joins in.

But there is a name. There has been a name since about week nine. It arrives sometimes, unbidden, usually late, and gets pushed away every time before it can settle.

I want to go carefully here, because I think I know what this is, and I do not want to be quick about it.

Naming is not a decision about a word. Naming is an act of attachment. To give a person a name is to say: you are real, you are mine, I have made room for you and I am not taking it back. Everybody knows this without being told, which is why it feels so heavy and why nobody can explain why.

And a person who has learned, somewhere, that wanting a thing openly is how you get hurt will hold that act at arm's length for as long as they possibly can.

Not because they love the child less. Because they love the child already, and have not got a safe way to say so.

That is what is happening in that house, and calling it procrastination is the only wrong description available.

There is a quiet in this that other people misread. From outside it looks like she is not interested. From inside it is somebody standing very still, holding something enormous, waiting to find out whether they are allowed to want it.

For, lo, the winter is past

There is a line in the Song of Solomon that is about a season changing, and it is gentler than most people remember.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. (Song of Solomon 2:11, King James Version)

You are permitted to notice that the winter has gone, and Song of Solomon 2:11 has never once asked anybody to prove it first. The written word simply announces the change, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an announcement into something a person can actually stand inside.

What is worth noticing is the order of it. The winter is past, and then, in the verses that follow, the flowers appear and the birds come back and the invitation comes: rise up and come away.

The announcement comes first. The moving comes second. Nobody is asked to feel the spring before it is declared over them.

You have been waiting for permission that was already given, and Scripture puts the declaring before the rising every time. The Spirit of God is the one who says it over somebody who has been standing very still since the spring.

What the distance is actually doing

Now let me be practical about the arm's length, because it is doing something and it deserves to be looked at honestly.

The distance feels like insurance. If a person does not fully arrive, then there is less to lose. That is the arithmetic, and it is done underneath thinking, and nobody who does it has ever chosen it on purpose.

Here is the trouble with the arithmetic. It does not work. It has never worked for anybody.

The love is already there. It arrived without permission. Withholding a name does not reduce it by a single degree. All the distance actually does is remove the joy from the months while leaving every bit of the love in place.

You are paying the whole cost of loving her and refusing yourself the pleasure of it, and no verse anywhere asked anybody to guard themselves against a gift. Song of Solomon 2 announces the end of the rain without a condition attached, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that reach a person who has been protecting herself out of habit.

And there is something else, which is quieter and which matters.

Not choosing is also a choice. It is a decision to spend these particular months at a distance, and those months do not come round again. The distance is not free and it never was.

You have been treating waiting as safe, and the written word calls the winter past and does not offer standing still as an option. The Spirit of God is the one who moves somebody from the wall into the room.

One name, once, out loud

So here is the practical thing, and it is deliberately small, because a person standing this still cannot be asked for a leap.

Say one name out loud, in a full sentence, to one other person.

Not a decision. Not a list. Not an announcement to a family. One name, said once, in an ordinary sentence, to one safe human being.

The reason it is small is that the size is the whole point. What is being asked for here is not a commitment. It is the first inch of arrival, and an inch is genuinely enough to start with.

You are able to take one inch today, and Song of Solomon 2:11 has never once demanded a whole season's worth of courage at once. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an inch possible, and the written word says the winter is past and then invites the rising afterward.

And here is what usually happens, and it is worth knowing in advance so it does not frighten anybody.

Saying it out loud will feel like more than it is. There will very likely be tears, and they will arrive from nowhere, and they are not grief. They are what happens when something held very tightly gets set down for a second.

You are allowed to cry over a word in a kitchen, and Scripture never once made composure the requirement for anything. The Spirit of God is present in exactly that kind of moment, which is what the whole of Song of Solomon 2 is about.