Fourteen Years Of Everything We Wore

It is on the driveway waiting to be collected.

They put it out there this morning, on its side at an angle nobody would ever choose, with the pipe still hanging off the back and a wet mark under it on the concrete.

And you have been at the window twice.

You would not describe yourself as somebody who gets attached to appliances. If anybody asked, you would say it is a washer and it is broken and the new one comes Thursday, and that would be a perfectly honest answer.

But you have been at the window twice, and the second time you were there longer than the first.

Fourteen years.

Everything anybody in this house has worn for fourteen years has been through that drum. Every school uniform. The clothes they came home from the hospital in. Every work shirt through two different jobs. The sheets from the week your mother stayed. The things you wore to the funeral, washed afterward and put away.

It ran four times a week for fourteen years and it never once flooded the kitchen and it never once ruined anything, and it was not an expensive machine.

And there is a feeling about it on the driveway that you have not put into words, and I do not think it is sentimentality about a metal box.

I think it is that something served this house for a very long time and is going away without anybody saying anything about it, and something in you knows that is not right.

So this article is about noticing it, and it is going to stop there.

Let me say that clearly, because you have read the other kind. I am not going to use your gratitude as a lever. This is not building toward a point about how God will provide a better one, or how faithfulness in small things leads to something. The old machine is not a lesson and it is not a stepping stone.

It served you for fourteen years. That is the whole thing, and it is enough on its own.

Your clothes are not waxen old upon you

There is a line in Deuteronomy where Moses reminds a people of something small they had not noticed.

And I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot. (Deuteronomy 29:5, King James Version)

Your clothes are not waxen old upon you.

Forty years of walking, and he does not point at the sea or the pillar of fire. He points at their clothes and their sandals.

That is a remarkable thing to build a sentence around. Out of everything in that story, this is the detail he stops on: the ordinary things you wear and stand in held up the entire time, and you did not notice, because a thing that keeps working is invisible.

That is exactly what a washer is.

Nobody thinks about a machine that works. It is only ever noticed at the two ends: the day it arrives and the day it fails. The fourteen years in the middle are silent by definition, and their silence is the evidence that it was doing its job.

And notice what Moses is doing with this. He is not moving on to a promise. In that sentence there is no next thing. He is saying: look at what has actually been holding you up, which you walked past every day for forty years without seeing.

That is a real spiritual act on its own, and it does not require a follow up.

So today, before that thing goes on a truck, you are allowed to look at the ordinary object that held up this household for fourteen years and see it, once, before it is gone.

Something ordinary has been holding this house up for fourteen years, and its working quietly has never once meant it was not doing anything. Deuteronomy 29:5 stops to name clothes and sandals that lasted a whole wilderness, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody at a window looking at a driveway.

It does not owe you anything

Here is the practical half, and it is about a small resentment you may not have named.

There is a part of you that is slightly annoyed with it.

Underneath the affection there is a thought that goes: it should have lasted longer. It went in a bad month. If it had held on another year we would have been in a better position to replace it.

That thought is normal and it is worth looking at directly, because it is quietly unfair.

That machine gave you fourteen years of four cycles a week. Work it out and it is somewhere around three thousand loads. It was not built for that, and it did it anyway, and then a part inside it wore through, which is what happens to parts that turn three thousand times.

It did not fail you. It ended.

A thing that has given everything it had does not owe you more at the end of it. The debt, if there is one, runs the other way, and it has been paid in every clean shirt that came out of it for fourteen years.

And I want to name why this matters beyond a washing machine, without making it into a lesson, because it is simply true. The way a person treats what has served them is a habit, and it is the same habit whether the thing served is a machine, a house, a car, a season of your life, or a person who was there for a stretch and then was not.

If everything that ends leaves you slightly resentful that it did not last longer, you will get to the end of a great many good things and remember only the ending.

That old machine is a chance to practice the other way round on something that costs you nothing.

A worn out thing has never once owed you more than it gave, and fourteen years of service was not a failure to last fifteen. The written word stops to notice clothes that held up a whole wilderness, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been slightly resentful at a driveway.

Say thank you for it, out loud

So here is the assignment, and it is going to feel ridiculous and I want you to do it anyway.

Say thank you out loud for the old one before it goes.

Go out to the driveway. Put your hand on it if you want to, or do not. And say something like: thank you. Fourteen years. Every single thing this house wore.

Out loud. Actually voiced.

Now, I know what the objection is, and it is a fair one. It is a machine. It cannot hear you. Saying thank you to an appliance is the kind of thing people are quietly embarrassed about.

So here is what is actually happening.

You are not thanking the machine. A machine has done nothing deserving of thanks, because it had no choice and no will. You are thanking God for fourteen years of a thing that worked, and you are doing it out loud, in front of the actual object, because that is how a person makes a thing real to themselves.

You could think it. Thinking it takes two seconds and leaves no mark. Saying it out loud in your own driveway is a small deliberate act, and you will remember doing it, and that is the entire difference.

And then let that be all of it.

Do not turn it into a prayer about the new one. Do not ask for the new one to last as long. This one moment is not for asking for anything, and the instant it becomes a request the noticing is gone and it has been used for something else.

Thank you, fourteen years, and then go back inside.

And if somebody sees you, it does not matter. A person standing quietly next to an old washing machine on a driveway looks like a person thinking about a washing machine.

You are able to say thank you out loud and let that be the whole of it, and gratitude has never once needed to be turned into a request. Deuteronomy 29:5 stops at the noticing and does not move on to a promise, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing in a driveway saying thank you.