The PowWow

The upstairs room at Jeremiah's had been Jacob's growing up — small, plain, a single window that caught the morning light at an angle that made everything in it look a little more sacred than it probably was, which felt about right for the day.

He stood in front of the mirror in his shirt, tie hanging loose around his neck, undone, the particular helplessness of a man who could dismantle a possessed businessman with his bare hands but had never once, in thirty years, successfully tied a full Windsor without assistance.

"Hold still," I said, stepping behind him, reaching around to take the two ends.

"I am holding still."

"You're vibrating. It's a whole different category of movement, but I appreciate the effort."

He didn't argue, which told me more about his nerves than anything he could have said out loud. I worked the knot the way I had a hundred times before — church, funerals, the handful of court appearances our line of work had occasionally required — and let the quiet do what quiet does between us, which is usually more honest work than either of us manages with words.

"You're distracted," Jacob said, once the knot was seated and I'd stepped back to check it.

"It's your wedding day. I'm allowed to be distracted by other things. Today is not about me."

"That is not what I said."

I straightened his collar, mostly to have something to do with my hands. "I'm fine, Jacob."

"You are not," he said. Simple. Certain. The particular flat conviction he brought to facts about the natural world, and, apparently, to facts about his brother.

I didn't answer right away. Outside, I could hear the house assembling itself into its wedding-day version — Rebecca's voice carrying up through the floor, sharp and delighted, directing someone toward the right vase; a car door somewhere in the drive; the specific busy hum of a home preparing to hold more joy than it usually holds in a single afternoon.

Jacob’s gaze, even reflected in the mirror, was fully on me and I could feel the forces of the earth moving, a landslide rushing down the mountainside. It was coming right at me. My breath caught for a second and I wondered if another redirect would work. Probably not, this was Jacob.

"There's a ring in my pocket," I said, finally. "Has been for weeks. I bought it before Isaiah. Before any of this."

Jacob turned from the mirror to look at me directly, and something in his face — not surprise, I don't think Jacob had been surprised by this particular fact in a long time — settled into the patient stillness he brings to things he's been waiting to be asked about.

"You are afraid," he said.

"I'm not afraid of Rachel. I know the answer already, or close enough to it that fear isn't really the word." I sat down on the edge of his bed, elbows on my knees, and found, for once, that I didn't have a joke ready to soften the ground under what I was about to say. "I don't know when. That's the whole problem. I keep waiting for some kind of signal, some moment where I'll just know, the way you always seem to know things, and it hasn't come, and today of all days I can't stop thinking about it, which feels like the worst possible day to be thinking about it, because today isn't supposed to be about me."

Jacob sat down beside me. The bed, which had held up under considerably worse over the years, made its opinion known and then settled.

"You asked me something once," he said. "In a car. After Nathanial."

"I've asked you a lot of things in the car."

"You asked how I would know," Jacob said, ignoring me with the particular patience he reserves for exactly this kind of deflection. "How I would know it was time, with Naomi. And I remember what you told me, because I have thought about it many times since."

I hadn't expected that. "I don't actually remember what I told you."

"You said I was asking you because I thought you knew," Jacob said. "And you told me you didn't. But you knew Who did." He looked at me, steady. "James, chapter one. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally, and without reproach. You are asking me the same question you once told me to ask Him."

I sat with that a moment.

"So ask," Jacob said. "Not me. Him. I am only the one saying it back to you, the way you once said it to me."

"That's annoyingly fair."

"I am aware."

I let out a breath, something in my chest loosening slightly, the particular relief of hearing your own advice returned to you at exactly the moment you'd forgotten you'd ever given it. I also found myself less annoyed than I thought I could be when that happened.

"You are trying to predict ten years from now," Jacob said, after a moment. "Whether it will work. Whether the timing is right, whether the wedding season, whether Rachel, whether everything lines up the way you think it needs to line up before you can trust it." He shook his head, slow. "Scripture never asks you to predict that far. Proverbs three. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. Not clear. Not visible ten years out. Straight. One step in front of the other, walked in trust rather than certainty."

"I don't have certainty," I said. "That's the whole issue."

"You are not asked to have certainty," Jacob said. "You are asked to have trust. Those are not the same thing, and I think you have been quietly waiting for the first one to arrive before you'll allow yourself the second." He paused. "Psalm thirty-seven. Commit your way to the Lord; trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass. Not you. Him. You keep trying to bring it to pass yourself, on your own schedule, and then feeling guilty when the schedule doesn't produce a clean answer."

I looked down at my hands. "When, though. That's still the actual question. I can trust Him completely and still not know when."

"Ecclesiastes," Jacob said. "He has made everything beautiful in its time." A small pause, the particular weight he gives to things he considers settled. "In its time, Levi. Not in yours. Not in mine. His time has never once been early, and it has never once been late, in the whole of both our lives, and I do not know why you would expect it to start missing its mark now, with this."

I almost smiled at that, despite everything.

"And the last one," Jacob said, quieter now, "is not a correction. It is only something true, that I think you already know, and have been afraid to trust because you thought trusting it would look like impatience." He looked at me directly. "Song of Solomon. Do not stir up nor awaken love until it pleases. Some translations say, until it is ready. You have been treating your love for Rachel like something that still needs to be built, still needs to arrive at readiness. But I do not think that is true. I think the love is already there, Levi. Already whole. Already exactly what it needs to be. And where there is love like that — real love, patient love, love that has already weathered attraction, resolve, fear, being stuck, and recently, obstacles like her obsession at work — I think the Lord is already in it. Has been the whole time. You are not waiting for the love to be ready. You are waiting for yourself to believe it already is."

The house was quiet upstairs, holding something important, while below us the whole rest of the day carried on without needing either of us yet.

"You keep asking when you'll know it's time," Jacob said, finally, and his voice had gone very gentle, yet could still grind burrs of solid stone. "Scripture doesn't give us calendars. It gives us wisdom. Ask God for it, instead of asking me, or asking a feeling that hasn't arrived yet the way you expected it to. Trust Him instead of your own certainty. Don't hurry your steps, but don't manufacture more caution than the moment actually requires either. Let the peace of Christ be the umpire in your heart — that's Paul, not me, though I know you already knew that. And when you can honestly say you're not asking because you're afraid of losing her, or because you're tired of waiting, or because you need an answer to your own loneliness — but because you have counted the cost, and sought the Lord, and you are ready to spend the rest of your life serving her beside Christ — I don't think you will need me, or anyone else, to tell you it is time."

He put a hand on my shoulder, heavy, certain, the same weight I'd felt from him a hundred times in a hundred different rooms. Continental weight.

"You will simply find yourself walking in the direction God has already been leading," he said. "The same as I did. The same as you told me I would."

I sat with that for a long moment, the words settling into the exact shape I'd apparently been needing them to take for weeks without knowing how to ask for it.

"After today," I said, finally. "That's the one thing I do know. Not the ring in my pocket — that part I still have to sit with, the way you just said. But today's not competing with anything else. Today's yours and Naomi's, and I'm not walking into the middle of it holding a box, no matter how ready any other part of me might be."

Jacob's mouth moved, the small, real almost-smile.

"I never doubted that part," he said. "That part was never the question."

He stood, checked his tie once more in the mirror — my work, holding — and looked at his own reflection with the particular quiet wonder of a man about to become someone's husband in under an hour.

"Thank you," I said.

He looked at me. "You said the same to me once. In a different room. I only returned it."

I stood too, straightened my own jacket, and followed my brother down into the gathering light of the best day either of us had been given in a very long time. It never once occurred to me that Jacob had used more words today than in, perhaps his entire life.

Thank You, Lord, for my brother... and for speaking through him when I needed it most.