Another Man Ties His Shoes

The shoes are set out in front of the chair the way they are every morning, toes pointing at him, laces already loosened.

Frank is in the chair. The stick is against the wall where it lives now, and the light is coming in over the roofs opposite the way it does at about half past seven, and downstairs somebody has put the radio on. He has his socks on. He got the socks on himself and it took a while and he is not going to mention that either.

Ann comes in with her hair still damp and says something about the bin men, and she says it while she is crossing the room, and she is already crouching down in front of him by the time she gets to the end of the sentence. She takes the left shoe. She works the tongue up with her thumb the way she has learned to and slides his foot in and does the laces, quickly, two loops, tight but not too tight, the way she does it. Then the right one. It takes about forty seconds all in.

She talks the whole time. About the bin men, and then about her sister, and then about whether he wants the blue jumper because it is colder than it looks.

Neither of them says anything about the shoes.

They have not said anything about the shoes since March. That is five months of somebody kneeling on the carpet in front of him every single morning, and five months of a conversation about bin men and jumpers happening over the top of it, and by now the not saying anything has its own weight in the room, heavier than the thing itself.

He knows exactly why she does it that way. She does it that way to spare him. She is being kind, deliberately and at cost, and if she stopped talking and looked up at him while she was doing the laces he honestly does not know what he would do. So the talking is a gift and he receives it as one.

And still. Underneath it, all the way underneath, there is something in Frank that has been standing in the same spot since March with its mouth open and nothing coming out.

It is not about shoes. He knows that. It is that he was a man who put his own shoes on for sixty eight years and now he is a man who does not, and there was no ceremony for it, no last time that anybody marked, just a Tuesday in March when it turned out to be too hard and then it was simply how things are.

He looks at the top of his wife's head while she pulls the second bow tight. She is going gray at the part in her hair. He wants to say something. He has wanted to say something for five months.

Ann pats his knee twice, gets up, says right, and goes to find the blue jumper.

He said it out loud

There is a conversation on a beach at the end of John's gospel that people mostly remember for the three questions, and then it goes somewhere almost nobody quotes.

Jesus has just finished restoring Peter, publicly, over a charcoal fire, and then He turns and says this to him:

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.John 21:18

Girded. It means dressed. Peter, who has spent his whole life pulling his own belt tight and going wherever he decided to go, is told plainly by Jesus that a day is coming when another pair of hands does it for him.

And look at what Jesus does not do with that sentence.

He does not soften it. He does not tell Peter it will not be so bad. He does not offer him a way of looking at it that makes it into a blessing, and He does not tell him to be at peace with it. He says another shall gird thee, and carry thee, and then He adds four words that most religious language would have edited out on the grounds of being unhelpful: whither thou wouldest not.

Where you do not want to go. Jesus put that in. You are allowed to not want this, and the permission comes from His own mouth. The written word has Christ Himself naming a loss without decorating it, and the Holy Spirit is not in the business of talking a man out of what he actually feels about a Tuesday in March.

That matters enormously in a bedroom where nobody says anything. The silence in Frank's house is kindness, and it is also five months of a real thing having no name. Jesus gave it a name on a beach. You have His own words for what happened to you, and they are honest ones. Scripture does not require a man to describe his own loss in cheerful language before he is allowed to bring it up, and the Holy Spirit does not need it dressed for company either.

And then He said follow me

Here is the part that changes the shape of a morning.

The very next thing recorded after that sentence, once John has explained what Jesus meant by it, is two words. Jesus says to him: follow me.

Not follow me until then. Not follow me while you still can. He says it immediately after describing the version of Peter who has to be dressed by somebody else, and He says it as a present tense command to the man in front of Him, which means the call runs straight through the loss without dropping a grade on the other side of it.

There is a very common idea that a person's usefulness to God is a curve, and that it goes up while capacity goes up and comes down when capacity comes down, so that the man in the chair is now on the descending part and is being kept on out of kindness. That idea is not in this passage anywhere. You were called by a Jesus who already knew about the hands that would dress you. The written word puts the calling after the description and not before it, and the Holy Spirit does not attach a person's standing to the number of things they can still do alone.

And notice who Peter is at that moment. He is not the man who walked on water. He is the one who denied Him three times a few days earlier and has just been asked three times if he loves Him, and he is still the one being told to follow. You are being followed up by the same Lord who never once graded a disciple on capacity. Scripture keeps the call and the weakness in the same paragraph on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps them there in a bedroom at half past seven.

Nothing here says how Frank's mornings go from now on. That is not being promised in either direction, and it would not be honest to promise it. What is being said is what is actually written down: that the loss got named by Christ, and the call came after it.