The One They All Think Is Ready

When somebody in this family gets bad news they come to this kitchen.

They have done it for fifty years. They sit in the good chair, and she makes the tea, and at some point she says the thing she says, and they go home steadier than they arrived. It works. It has always worked. Three generations have been steadied at that table and two of them have no idea it was ever a skill.

Her granddaughter said something to her last month, standing at the counter, while she dried a cup.

She said, Nan, you are not scared of anything.

She meant it as the loveliest thing she could think of to say. She was not asking a question. She said it and she smiled and she went off to find her keys.

And the old woman said, no, love. And poured her another cup.

Here is what she has never said to a living soul in this house.

She is the only one in it who is frightened.

She is also, by some distance, the nearest to it. That is simply arithmetic and she is not sentimental about arithmetic. She is eighty three and everybody else at that table has decades.

And she cannot say a word.

Not because they would be unkind. They would be devastated, and they would be wonderful, and they would gather round, and the whole thing would become a family event, and every single one of them would go home shaken, because the calm in this family is not distributed evenly. It is drawn off her. It always has been.

She has known that for years and she has never once minded it. She would do it again. That is what a woman does in a family, and she is glad to be that woman, and she is not looking for a medal.

She is simply standing at the sink some evenings with her hands in the water thinking, and who does mine.

If you are the one everybody borrows their calm from, come and sit in the good chair for once. Somebody else is making the tea.

The verse where God does all the verbs

There is a promise spoken directly to people at your end of a life, and the striking thing about it is who is doing the work in every clause.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Count them. I am. I will carry. I have made. I will bear. I will carry. Will deliver.

Six, and every single one belongs to God.

There is not one instruction anywhere in that verse. Nobody is told to be strong for anybody. Nobody is told to hold steady, or to set an example, or to be the one the family takes its bearings from.

The person in that sentence is being carried, and hoar hairs means exactly what you think it means, and the promise is aimed at precisely the age at which everybody else assumes you no longer need it.

You are being carried by the same God who made you, and every verb in that promise is His rather than yours. Isaiah 46:4 puts the bearing and the carrying and the delivering entirely on God and speaks it to a person with white hair, and the Holy Spirit kept it addressed to old age specifically, which means the woman everybody else leans on is the one being held up in that verse.

Nothing on this page is going to frighten you

Let us say plainly what will not happen here, because the bracing starts early and it costs something all on its own.

Nothing about scenarios. Nothing about the news, no signs read off anything happening anywhere, no attempt at all to move an eighty three year old woman by making her afraid. Fear has never once been a legitimate way to move anybody, and it will not be used in this kitchen.

You are not being urged along by dread, and nothing being handed to you this morning runs on it. 1 John 4:18 says there is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear, and it is written of what love does to fear rather than of what a person must do about it, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Comforter, which means the register on offer here is the one you have been unable to reach on your own.

Fifty years of supplying it

Now the calm itself, because it has been treated as a personality trait by everybody in this family including you, and it is not one.

It is work. Fifty years of quiet, unpaid, unnoticed work, done at a table, one bad afternoon at a time.

And a woman who has been the source of a thing for fifty years starts to believe, without ever putting it into words, that she is required to manufacture it, and that the day she cannot the whole family goes down.

You were never the supply, and nobody in heaven has been drawing this out of you. Psalm 68:19 says blessed be the Lord, who daily loadeth us with benefits, even the God of our salvation, and it is written of a God who is the one doing the loading rather than a saint being drawn on, and it is His Spirit who is the Comforter in a house rather than the eldest woman in it.

They have not been taking it off you. They have been taking it off Him, through you, and the difference matters at eighty three at a sink with your hands in the water.