She Cannot Picture It

The workbook said: close your eyes and see yourself five years from now.

Sinead closed her eyes.

Nothing came. Not a room, not a job, not a face, not a road. Not even a bad picture, which she would have taken. A complete blank, held for about ninety seconds, in a church hall with fourteen other women all apparently doing it fine.

She wrote something on the sheet so as not to be the only one with an empty box. She wrote content.

She is forty-three. She came out of an arrangement in November and it was long and it was not simple and everybody who knows says she was right. She has a flat and a job and a friend who calls.

Here is what has been happening since that Thursday.

She has tried it seven or eight times on her own. In bed. In the car. Once, ridiculously, standing in a shop. Close the eyes. Five years. And there is nothing there, and after about the fourth attempt she stopped trying to see anything and started worrying about what the nothing meant.

That is where she is now. Not sad about the future. Concerned about her own blankness, and reading it as information.

Here is the day it caught.

The woman running the group, who is kind, phoned to check in and said, "How did you get on with the visioning?"

And Sinead said, "Yeah, good."

And the woman said, "Great. It is amazing what comes up, isn't it?"

And Sinead said, "It really is."

You know that. Somebody handed you an exercise that assumes a faculty, and the faculty did not respond, and you have quietly concluded that the silence is a diagnosis.

Three verbs, and none of them is picture

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you what your five years look like. I do not know. I am not going to give you a verdict on the arrangement or on the woman running the group, who by every indication is doing her best with a decent exercise that does not fit everybody.

What I will do is read you a verse about guidance and count the verbs in it.

I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.Psalm 32:8

Three verbs. Instruct. Teach. Guide.

Not one of them is show you a picture. Not one of them requires the person being guided to be able to see anything at all.

Instruct is a word about direction being given. Teach is a word about something being learned over time. And the third one is the strangest and the best.

I will guide thee with mine eye.

That is not a picture handed to the traveler. That is a person being watched, closely, by somebody who can see the road, and steered by the attention of the one watching. It is the way you guide a child across a room full of people, or a horse, or a friend at a difficult table. The seeing is entirely on the other side.

You are being guided by an eye that is not yours, and the verse never once asks the person being guided to see the route. Psalm 32:8 puts the seeing on God's side of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a church hall with a workbook in it.

And notice the tense. I will instruct. Future, continuous, promised. It is not conditional on the person producing a vision first.

You have never been asked to supply the picture, and none of the three verbs in that verse depends on anything happening behind your eyes. It is written that He will instruct and teach and guide, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient promise a present provision.

The blank is not a diagnosis

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

The exercise is not wicked and the woman running it is not a fraud. Visualizing works for a great many people and there is nothing spiritually suspect about it.

But it assumes something. It assumes a person has practice at imagining a future for themselves, and that assumption is invisible to everybody who has that practice.

Sinead was in an arrangement for a long time where imagining her own future was not a useful activity. It was, at best, a way to be disappointed on schedule. So the faculty went out of use, exactly the way any unused faculty does.

You are looking at disuse rather than damage, and there is nothing in Scripture that grades a person on the vividness of their inner life. Psalm 32:8 offers instruction and teaching over time, which is the language of something being built rather than something being unlocked, and the Holy Spirit is what works at the speed a person actually rebuilds.

And here is the specific thing I want to take off you, which is not the blankness.

It is the reading. Four attempts in and you stopped looking for a picture and started interpreting the absence of one. And what the absence was allowed to say, unchallenged, is: there is nothing ahead of you.

That is not what a blank means. A blank means the eyes are closed and nothing is coming up. It has no opinion about the future at all.

You are not holding a message, and an unused faculty has never once been able to report on what is coming. Psalm 32:8 has the future held by the One with the eye rather than by the one with the imagination, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a silence from being read as a sentence.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the months since November have gone somewhere heavier than blank, or if content on that sheet was a kinder word than the true one, do not sit with that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your friend who calls, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about what you came out of. That is me refusing to leave you in that hall by yourself.