Thirty Years of Wednesdays

The urn is unplugged and there are still eleven chairs out.

Wednesday night prayer let out twenty minutes ago and she is stacking, because she is always the one stacking. Four to a stack, seats folded, and the stacks go against the wall under the bulletin board with the missionary photographs curling at the corners. Half a sleeve of vanilla wafers left on the table. The long fluorescent tube over the kitchen pass through ticks when it has been on too long, and it has been on too long.

The prayer list is still on the clipboard in three colors of ink. Surgery on the ninth. A grandson nobody has heard from. A job. A marriage, written small.

A young woman is helping her, maybe twenty five, new to the church and glad to be there, and she asks it easily, the way you ask about the weather.

Thirty years of these. What has God changed in you?

It is a kind question. It is an honest question. And she opens her mouth and there is nothing in it.

So she says God has been good, which is true, and which is not an answer. The young woman smiles and carries her stack to the wall, and the lights go off in the fellowship hall one bank at a time.

The question rides home with her on the county road. Nine miles, no streetlights, a deer standing in somebody's cut corn, and the inventory starts running before she reaches the stop sign.

She still worries about money the way her mother did, in the same voice, at the same hour of the night. She still cannot let a silence sit in a room. She still says yes to things at nine at night and resents them by Saturday. Thirty years of Wednesdays. Thirty years of that clipboard. Thirty years of praying for other people's grandsons.

She pulls into the drive and does not go in. She sits with the engine ticking and the porch light on and thinks, with no drama in it at all, that she cannot name one thing.

And you know that drive home. Maybe yours is a hallway, or a parking lot, or the four minutes after a small group where somebody asked something warm and you had nothing warm to hand back. The question was not cruel. That is what makes it sit there. Somebody asked what God has done in you, and you went looking for the list, and the column was blank.

The list she could not write

Let me say something about that question, because it followed a good woman nine miles down a dark road and it should not have.

A person is the worst placed instrument in the world for measuring what God has done in a person. We are inside it. We have no photograph of ourselves from thirty years back, only a story, and the story got edited every year by the one telling it. Asking a woman to audit her own soul and then believing the audit is like asking a house to describe its own foundation.

And here is where Scripture puts her, which is not on the witness stand at all.

To give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified.Isaiah 61:3

Read what the noun is. Not the gardener. The planting. A tree has no idea what it looked like the year it went in the ground, and nobody has ever asked it to remember, and the Spirit who spoke that line through the prophet is the same Spirit at work in a fellowship hall thirty centuries later.

You are the planting of the Lord, and a planting is not required to describe itself. That is what Isaiah 61:3 hands her on the county road instead of a ledger.

Now hold that against what she was doing in the car. She was trying to be the gardener and the tree at once, keeping the records and growing the leaves, and no living thing has ever been asked to do both.

You have been keeping a ledger nobody ever asked you to keep. His word says the planting is the Lord's and the glory is the Lord's, and it is His Spirit who does the work in the root, so the bookkeeping was always volunteer labor.

Nobody has ever watched a tree grow

Jesus told a very short story about this that almost nobody quotes, and it was told for exactly this woman.

So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.Mark 4:26-27

He knoweth not how. That is not a failure in the farmer. That is the design. The man sleeps and gets up, and the thing under the dirt does what it does, and the not knowing is written into the parable on purpose. The Spirit who inspired that line is not embarrassed by a woman who cannot account for her own root system.

You are being grown in the dark, and the dark is not neglect. Mark 4 says the seed springs and grows while the man sleeps, and it is the Spirit of God, not the alertness of the sleeper, who does the springing.

Think about what a tree does in a year that nobody can see. It puts down root, which is the only work that matters in a drought, and root growth is entirely invisible and entirely unmeasurable from a lawn chair. A woman who has prayed through thirty winters has root. She has no photograph of it. Neither does anybody else, until the dry summer comes and she is the one still standing.

You have real growth on you that you could not itemize on a clipboard, and the not being able to is written into the story Jesus told. His word puts the growing under the ground and the sleeping man above it, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the quiet work down there, which means nothing here waits on her recall.

Ask the ones who used to brace

If she wants evidence, she is asking the wrong witness, and there are better ones in her own church.

Ask the daughter in law. Ask the woman she used to be short with in the choir room. Ask the man whose grandson has been on that clipboard for four years. They will not describe what she would describe. They will say something about how long she waits before she answers now. Or how she is the one people tell things to. Or that there was a season, a while back, when they braced a little whenever her name came up on the phone, and that it has been a long time since they braced.

And if what settled on her in that driveway is more than tiredness, if it has been on her since spring, then a person coming alongside her is not a way around what God is doing. That is one of His ordinary ways of doing it. A doctor, because pain and grief and a thyroid and a bad year of sleep do more to a soul's weather than anybody admits from a pulpit. A counselor, who can sit with a pattern month on month and see what a woman standing inside it cannot. One friend with the unedited version. And if her nights have gone somewhere she would not say out loud in a prayer circle, 988 will answer her tonight, phone or text, and the crisis line nearest her will too, and somebody ought to be close enough to sit with her until morning. On a dark county road that is not a change of subject. It is the whole subject.

You were carried through all thirty of those winters, and you were never once growing on your own strength. Scripture calls Him the God who upholds, Psalm 37:24, and Helper, the name Jesus put on His Spirit, is a shift He took up rather than praise He handed down.