The Letters Simply Stopped Coming

It ran for nine years and it was, by any reasonable measure, the most substantial thing in his adult life.

Actual letters. Both of them preferred paper, which was already old fashioned when it started, and there is a box in his study with a hundred and forty of them in it and he knows the number because he counted them in the second year and has kept counting since.

The older man wrote about four pages at a time in a hand that was hard to read for the first year and then became the easiest thing in the world to read.

He would answer a question and then ask two, which is the whole method and is the reason it lasted.

Four years ago it stopped.

There was no last conversation. He wrote in February, a fairly ordinary letter, and there was no reply, and after about seven weeks he wrote a short one asking if everything was all right, and there was no reply to that either.

He knows the man is alive. He knows through two removes that his health has not been good and that he stopped a number of things around the same period, and that is almost certainly the whole of it and he tells himself so regularly.

Almost certainly. That word is doing a great deal of work in that sentence and he knows it is.

Because there is another possibility, and it has lived in him for four years, and it is this: that there was something in that February letter.

He has read it, obviously. He kept a copy because he keeps copies. He has read it more times than he would want to admit, at various hours, looking for the sentence, and he has never found it.

That has not settled the question. It has only established that if the sentence is in there, he cannot see it, which is precisely the kind of blindness a man would have about his own writing.

So a hundred and forty letters and nine years now end in a fog, and the fog is the only part he can still act on, so he keeps acting on it.

And you have a correspondence like that. Something substantial that stopped without a reason, and you have gone back over the last one looking for what you did.

Never leave, never forsake, and the sentence has four negatives in it

There is a promise in Hebrews thirteen that is quoted constantly, and what almost nobody mentions is how emphatically it is constructed in the original.

for he has said, "I will never leave you nor forsake you."Hebrews 13:5

The Greek stacks negatives in a way English cannot really carry. It is closer to: I will not, not leave you; I will never, no never forsake you. It is written to be unmistakable, by a writer who knew exactly who reads a promise like that, which is people who have been left.

And notice the tense the writer puts around it: for He has said. Past tense. It is already spoken, and the promise is not being made now in response to a situation, it was made long ago and is simply being pointed at.

You are inside a promise that was already spoken before any of this happened. It is written, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a stacked ancient negative into something a man can actually put weight on in a quiet study four years into a silence.

Now the February letter, because that is where four years have gone.

You have read it looking for the sentence and you have not found it. You have concluded that this proves nothing, because a man cannot see his own blind spot.

But look at what that reasoning does. It makes the theory unfalsifiable. There is no evidence that could ever clear you, because absence of the sentence is explained by your inability to see it, which means the search can run forever and will.

You are too rigorous a man to accept that structure in any other argument. You would take it apart in ten seconds if a student brought it to you.

You are running an argument that cannot be answered, and you would not accept it from anybody else. Scripture says God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything (1 John 3:20), and it is the Holy Spirit who convicts specifically about actual things, and He has said nothing to you about February in four years.

And the thing you know through two removes.

His health has not been good. He stopped a number of things in the same period. You have that information and you have set it beside your theory and you have gone on giving the theory equal weight, which is not how a careful man weighs evidence.

There is a plain explanation that accounts for everything and requires nothing to be hidden, and there is a theory that requires an invisible sentence in a letter you have read a dozen times.

You have a sufficient explanation already and you have been declining to accept it. It is written that a man's steps are from the Lord (Proverbs 20:24), and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person rest in a plain explanation rather than searching for a hidden one that would make it their fault.

And now the thing worth saying about nine years.

A hundred and forty letters. A method of answering one question and asking two. A hand that became the easiest thing in the world to read.

None of that is retroactively altered by how it ended. Nine years happened and they were the most substantial thing in your adult life, and the last four weeks of them are not a summary of the previous four hundred and sixty.

You received nine years, and an ending without an explanation cannot reach back and edit them. Scripture says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation (James 1:17), and it is His Spirit who was the constant underneath a correspondence between two men who liked paper.