Helped Up From The Chair

It is the sound he makes. That is the thing she cannot get past.

Not the hand under her arm, exactly, and not the little lean forward that she now has to do, and not even the fact that it takes two tries some evenings. It is a small sound in his throat, halfway to a grunt, that he does not know he makes, and that means he is taking her weight.

Her son. Fifty-one years old and gray at the sides and he has a bad shoulder himself, which he does not mention, and every evening at about ten he comes round the front of the chair and puts his hand under her arm and makes that sound.

She has said thank you so many times that it has stopped being a word.

She raised four. She carried a washing basket up a hill road for eleven years because there was nowhere flat to hang anything. She was the one who went to people's houses when there was trouble in this village, and she went at night, and she never once told anybody she was tired.

And now, at ten o'clock, there is a hand under her arm and a sound in a man's throat.

The sentence is not I am getting old. She knows she is old and she has no argument with it. The sentence is: I have become the thing I used to do for other people.

You know that sentence, or you will. It might be a stair lift, or a lid, or a form somebody fills in for you now. Somewhere the direction reversed, and nobody warns you that the reversal feels less like age and more like disgrace.

He said the gray hairs out loud

There is a verse where God takes the whole of a human life, including the end of it, and puts His own name on the carrying. He does not skip the hard part. He says it out loud.

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 the verbs He takes: made, bear, carry, deliver. And count the ones He gives you: none. The verse is a list of things God does to a person who has grown old, and it was written to a people who had begun to think that being carried was a humiliation, because they had just watched other nations carry their gods around on carts.

That is the contrast in the chapter. Some gods have to be carried. This one carries.

You are being carried by God, at ten o'clock in the evening, and He said your gray hairs out loud before you had a single one. That is what the written word says over you and not a kind thing invented for an old woman having a hard week, and the Holy Spirit who has been in you since the hill road is the evidence that the carrying was never something that started when you got weak.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic you run at ten every night. If the carrying is His and always was, then a hand under your arm is information about a body that has done eighty-some years of work. It is not information about your worth, and it never had the standing to become that.

The hill road was carried too

Here is the second thing, and it is the part that turns the whole evening over.

Your life has been divided into two eras: the era of carrying, and the era of being carried. That division feels obvious and it is false.

Eleven years of a washing basket up a hill road. Four children. All those nights in other people's houses. Who do you suppose was carrying you then? The verse does not say I will start carrying you when you get old. It says I have made, and I will bear, all one piece, all one lifetime, the whole way through, including every year you thought you were doing it under your own power.

You have been carried the entire time, and the only thing that changed at ten o'clock this evening is that some of the carrying became visible. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been doing that carrying since long before your son was born.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to be more grateful, or to accept help graciously, or any of the other things people say to old women with a brightness that would make anybody furious. If you never make peace with that hand under your arm you have not stepped one inch outside the carrying of God, because it was never conditional on your feelings about it.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought in a quiet room. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not swallowed with a thank you that has stopped being a word. And the thing in the way is not your son, who would be horrified to know, and it is not the sound in his throat. It is a sentence: I have become the thing I used to do for other people. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority in a chair at ten at night. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how steady your voice is now.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than sadness, and there are nights when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.