I Compare Her To The Child I Pictured

There was one, before she arrived.

You did not invent her deliberately. Nobody sits down and designs a child. But somewhere in the months before, a picture assembled itself out of what you hoped and what you remembered and what you were determined would be different, and by the time she was born there was somebody already in the room.

And the somebody who arrived was not that one.

That is not a complaint about her. It could not be. It is a fact about every parent who has ever lived, and almost none of them say it out loud, because saying it sounds like a betrayal of the child who is actually here.

So it goes unsaid, and unsaid things do not sit still, and it comes out sideways as a kind of low disappointment that has nothing to attach itself to.

My thoughts are not your thoughts

There is a sentence in Isaiah that is usually read as being about God's plans and is also about our pictures.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. (Isaiah 55:8, King James Version)

Two negatives, and the second one is the one that does the work here. Neither are your ways my ways.

That is a statement of difference rather than of correction. It does not say your thoughts were bad. It says they are not the same thoughts, which is a different and much larger claim.

You have been shown a difference rather than an error, and no picture a parent held has ever once been condemned by this verse. Isaiah 55:8 names the gap without assigning blame, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person set a picture down without it being a confession.

And there is something worth having in what comes just before it, which is a passage about God abundantly pardoning. This verse arrives in the middle of mercy, not in the middle of a rebuke.

You were never being told off for having imagined anything, and scripture has never once treated a hope as a sin. The written word places the difference inside a passage about pardon, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes the context part of the sentence.

The unnamed loss

Let me name the thing that is actually going on, because until it is named it cannot stop.

There was a loss. A small one, real, and completely unmourned.

The child you pictured did not die, because she never existed. But she was genuinely held, for months, with real feeling, and then she was quietly replaced by somebody else, and nobody said anything about it because there was a baby to look after.

You have been carrying a grief with no name on it, and an unnamed grief has never once been able to be finished. Isaiah 55:8 names a difference plainly rather than pretending it away, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person call a small loss a loss.

And here is why it matters for your actual daughter, sitting at that table.

Unmourned things attach themselves to whatever is nearby. So a picture that was never grieved goes and lands on the person standing where it used to be, and she gets a low background disappointment that belongs to somebody who was never born.

That is not fair on her, and it is not your fault either, because nobody ever told you that this was a thing that happened.

You have been handing her a feeling that has never once been about her. The written word distinguishes two sets of thoughts without ranking them, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a grief back onto the thing it actually belongs to.

You were never disappointed in the girl who came, and nobody has ever once been able to be disappointed by somebody they never met. Isaiah 55:8 sets the difference out plainly, and it is the Holy Spirit who separates the two children a parent has been holding in one place.

Two lines, tonight

So here is the assignment, and it is two lines and it takes four minutes.

Tonight, write one line about the child you pictured. One specific thing. Not a personality: a scene, or a moment, or something you imagined doing together.

Then write one thing the real one actually did today.

You have two sentences to write tonight and no conclusion to draw from them, and a page with no verdict on it has never once been an unfinished one. Isaiah 55:8 sets two sets of thoughts side by side and ranks neither, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present while both lines go down.

And leave them both on the page, side by side, without doing anything about it. Do not draw a conclusion. Do not write a third line about how the second is better, because that would be a lie and she would not need it anyway.

The point of the two lines is that they are two, and until tonight they have been one.

What that does is finish something quietly. The picture gets acknowledged, once, on paper, by the only person who ever knew about her. And then it stops needing to be carried.

Isaiah 55:8 names two sets of thoughts as genuinely different, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at a table with somebody writing two lines about two girls.

You are permitted to acknowledge a thing you invented, and acknowledging has never once been the same as preferring it. The written word states the difference without a verdict, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present while both lines get written.

You have four minutes tonight that can end something that has run for years, and it has never once required you to explain it to anybody. Isaiah 55:8 sits inside a passage about pardon, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the acknowledging an ending rather than a wound.