But there is forgiveness with you,
Therefore you are feared.
I wait for Yahweh,
My soul waits.
I hope in his word.
If that doesn’t say it all.She tipped her head back and closed her eyes.Thank you, God, for day three. She’d made it to day three without a drink many times before, but that didn’t make it any less of an accomplishment. It was hard to make it to day three. Even harder to make it to day five. She’d had far fewer of those.
And she couldn’t remember the last time she’d made it to day ten.
She couldn’t take her momentum for granted. If she thought she had it in the bag, she was more likely to soon find herself halfinthe bag.
She looked at the clock. She should go to a meeting this afternoon, keep her streak going. There wasn’t a meeting in Hartport today, but there was one in Wiscasset, and she had enough gas to get there and back.
This was good. She would go to a meeting. She got up to go to the bathroom, and on her way back, her phone dinged with a notification. She opened her social media app to see that the notification was entirely uninteresting. But then she started scrolling.
She didn’t see anything new. Reiterations of the same statuses people had been posting for the last several years. Women bemoaning how poorly their men behaved. Photographs of food. People arguing about politics. People arguing about God—not so much whether or not he existed, though there was some of that, but mostly just believers telling other believers they were doing it wrong. And vice versa.
Slowly, the energy leaked out of her, and she put the phone down to see that an hour had passed. Shoot. She hadn’t meant to spend that much time on a stupid app. Now she had to hurry to get ready if she was going to make it to the Wiscasset meeting. Her eyes drifted to the closed cupboard door.
She didn’t think about it much. Her feet simply carried her to the cupboard like they knew what they were doing. Then her arm reached and took a glass out of the dish strainer. And her other arm reached to open the cupboard. A small voice whispered an argument, but she gave it no audience. She pulled the cork out, not thinking about her three-day streak. She poured the wine, not thinking about the psalm that had just embraced her like a heavenly hug. And she took a drink, not thinking about anything.
Immediately that familiar, fantastic warmth hit her mind and her stomach simultaneously. She closed her eyes to better enjoy that profound settling, and then smiling, she picked up her glass and went back to her chair. She closed the Bible, set it aside, and turned on the television.
Minutes later, when she’d finished the glass, she got up, crossed the small apartment to grab the bottle, and then brought the bottle with her back to the chair.
She didn’t feel guilty. She didn’t feel disappointed. She didn’t feel much of anything.
Her phone dinged again. This time it was an email. She almost deleted it because the sender’s name read “Your Secret Admirer.” If that wasn’t spam, nothing was. But the subject line caught her eye: Gift Card to Feed the Family Christian Bookstore.
Wow. That was beyond strange.Secret admirer?She would have laughed if it weren’t so sad. No way did she have a secret admirer. And yet, here was a gift certificate, and it looked real.
She would have to go to the store and check. But they weren’t open tomorrow, so that was disappointing. Monday then, right after work.
She was about to close the email when she noticed two lines of text above the forwarding info. That’s all the sender—the alleged secret admirer—had written. Two lines.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Whoa. Did that not make any sense at all, or was she drunker than she thought? Wine did make her pretty stupid.
She read the lines again. Sort of sounded like poetry, but it was the shortest poem in the world, and why would any secret admirer include a short poem that said love wasn’t love?
She put her phone to sleep and closed her eyes. This was too much mystery for one night.
She would deal with it in the morning.