Losing the Light Faster Than They Said

The tins are all the same size. That is the trouble with tins.

Twenty past four in the afternoon, second week of November, and the kitchen has gone the color of dishwater. She has dragged the magnifier lamp right out to the edge of the counter, further than the arm was ever meant to travel, and it groans at the joint every time she pulls it. She holds a tin up under the glass and turns it slowly. Red. It is red, or it is orange, and there was a spring not long ago when that sentence would have made no sense to her at all.

Tomatoes on the left. Soup on the right. She built that system in April and she was quietly proud of it, the way a person is proud of something nobody knows about. Then somebody put the shopping away on Saturday, being kind, being helpful, and now the left is not the left.

She sets the tin down. She picks up the next one. Under the glass the letters float up like fish in a dark pond and then slide off again, and she catches three of them, and three letters is not a word.

The consultant used the word gradual. She wrote it on the back of the appointment card, in the car park, pressing so hard the pen went through. Gradual. It sounded like a promise at the time. It sounded like years, plural, with room in them.

That was not what gradual turned out to mean.

She has a count now, a private one she keeps and tells nobody. Faces at the far end of a room, gone in August. Her own handwriting, gone by half past three most days. The step down into the garden, which she now finds with her foot rather than her eye. She counts these the way some people count money, over and over, hoping the total comes out differently.

And I am going to stop saying she now.

Because you know the exact hour the light turns. You know it better than any clock in the house. You know which lamp you have moved, and how many times, and you know that the moving of lamps is a thing you now organize your life around and never mention. When somebody asks how the eyes are, you say a bit worse. Two words. A bit worse. Because if you said the true speed of it out loud, in a lit room, to a person who loves you, it would stop being something happening inside your own head and start being a real event in the world, and you are not ready for that.

So you carry the number by yourself. Nobody has ever asked you for it.

Nobody asks you what you want. They only tell you what to expect.

I want to sit down here with you before I say anything hopeful, because hope arrives cheap when it skips the hard part, and I will not do that to you. What I have brought is not mine. It is written down in Mark 10:51, and it is His Spirit who carries it as far as the counter with the lamp dragged out over the edge of it.

You are grieving. That is the word and nobody has offered it to you, because your eyes are still in your head and you are still walking about and making dinner, so it does not look like a loss to anyone from the outside. But you are losing something every few weeks and there is no funeral for it. You lost the far end of the room. You lost your own handwriting. You will lose the tins, and then the stairs, and each one goes quietly, and nobody sends anything, and you say a bit worse and put the kettle on.

And underneath all of it there is a low, humming fear that is not about blindness at all. It is about being handled. Being the one people speak more slowly to. Being moved gently around your own kitchen by somebody else's hands.

I am not going to argue you out of any of that. It is real and it is yours and God is not embarrassed by it. Nowhere in Scripture is a frightened person asked to stop being frightened before they are met, and His Spirit is not standing back from the private count you keep and tell nobody.

But I want to tell you what happened on a road outside Jericho, because there was a man there who was in exactly the position you are in, and the thing that changed was not his eyes first. It was that somebody finally asked him a question.

He was sitting at the roadside. Everyone in that town had already decided what he was, and they had decided it years ago, and none of them had asked him anything in a very long time. When he started shouting, the crowd told him to be quiet. That is not a small detail. The people around him were managing him. And then the whole procession stopped, and the only person there who could have kept walking did not keep walking, and He called for him, and when the man was standing in front of Him, He said this:

And Jesus said to him, "What do you want me to do for you?" And the blind man said to him, "Rabbi, let me recover my sight."Mark 10:51

Read that question again slowly, because it is the one nobody has asked you.

Everybody in your life is telling you what to expect. The letter tells you what to expect. The waiting room leaflet tells you what to expect. Your sister, who loves you, is already researching what to expect. And every one of them is doing their honest best, and not one of them has turned to you and said: what do you actually want.

Jesus asks. He asks a man whose answer was completely obvious. He asks because being asked is itself part of what a person needs. It gives you your voice back in the middle of a thing that has been taking your voice away by degrees.

And notice the man's answer, because it is one of the plainest sentences in the whole book. He does not make a speech. He does not qualify it, or make it smaller so as not to be greedy, or wrap it in language that would let him save face if nothing happened. He says the true thing. Rabbi, let me recover my sight.

You are allowed to want your sight. Out loud. In your own words. Wanting it is not a failure of acceptance and it is not spiritual immaturity. He asked the question because He wanted the answer, and Mark 10:51 has it written down so that you would know it was put to you as well. His Spirit is why it is still being asked at twenty past four in a kitchen the color of dishwater.

And now the practical word, because love is practical and I would be no use to you without it. Keep your appointments. Take what you have been given to take. Ring them when something changes, and change it faster than you think you need to. Keeping every appointment and following every instruction is not a lack of faith; it is care, and God is not in competition with the people He has put in that clinic with skilled hands. Faith is not the refusal of help. Faith is who you believe is standing behind the help.

I cannot tell you what your eyes are going to do. Anyone who tells you they know that is not being kind to you, they are being careless with you. What I can tell you is who stopped on the road. He is not further away from you than He was from that man in the dust, and He is not in a hurry, and He has not been told your prognosis by anybody, because He was there before the first letter arrived.