Forty Names and No One Asked

The urn is still on and there are eleven cups on the table with an inch of cold tea in the bottom of each, and she has picked up four of them without deciding to. The chairs are stacked six high against the wall by the fire door, because the youth group has the hall at four. Somebody's toddler is running the length of the carpet with one shoe on and nobody is chasing him yet.

She has been standing near the door for fifty minutes. In that time she has said forty names out loud. She counted once, years ago, out of curiosity, and it was thirty-eight, and it has only gone up since. Margaret, and the hip. The new couple whose names she got right on their second Sunday, who lit up about it. Dev, who asks a hard question at the door every single week and waits for the real answer. The man who comes in late and slips out during the last song, and whom she has never once let feel late. She asks after the hip, the interview, the daughter in Leeds, the scan on Thursday. She remembers all of it. Remembering is not even effort for her now. It is the shape her mind has taken.

Nobody has asked her about Tuesday.

There is no reason they should. Tuesday is not on anyone's list, because she has not put it there. She told two people it had been a bit of a week and then moved the conversation on in the same breath, smoothly, the way a hand comes off a hot pan before the brain has caught up. So this is not a story about people failing her. Half of them would sit down with her for an hour tonight if they knew, and somehow that does not touch the thing at all.

The thing is the fifty minutes. The thing is that somewhere in the middle of them she walked to the table, picked up two cups, and then stood there holding them and could not remember what she had come to the table for. Not tired. Something further along the road than tired. A flat, level, quiet nothing, standing in a warm room full of people who love her, holding two cups of somebody else's cold tea.

She put them down. She said three more names. She laughed in the right place in a story about a caravan holiday, and the laugh was real, which she noticed, and which confused her.

You know that room. It may not be a foyer for you and it may not be Sunday, but you know what it is to be the one who remembers everybody's Thursday and to have nowhere at all to say your own Tuesday out loud. I am not going to ask you to tell somebody. I want to show you what has actually been holding you up for the last fifty minutes, because it was never the smile and it was never you.

Nobody asked, and that is not the wound

Let me name the real wound, because it is not the one you would name.

It is not that they did not ask. You are good at making sure they do not, and you are good at it for a reason that is kind: you have watched what happens to a room when the person by the door is heavy, and you decided a long time ago to keep the room light. That is love, and I am not going to spoil it by calling it a fault.

The wound is underneath it. There is a quiet arithmetic that has been running in you for years, and it goes like this. Forty names went out of me. None came back. So what I am is the going out. So if the going out ever stops, there is nothing here that anybody would come to the door for.

That arithmetic is a lie, and it is a lie with a very old signature on it. Hear what God says over a people who were worn through and hauling around gods they had made themselves and now had to carry everywhere on carts.

Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.Isaiah 46:4

Read the grammar of it slowly. He made, and He bears. The same hands do both. It is not that God made you, handed you a load, and stepped back to see how you would manage it. Making and bearing sit in the same breath in the same mouth, and in the whole verse there is exactly one person doing any lifting, and it is not you.

You were made by Him and you are borne by Him, and those are not two jobs handed to two different people. That is the written word in Isaiah 46:4, not a poetic way of praising a good attitude, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an ancient sentence about carrying land in a body that has nothing left in it.

You are carried, and you were carried through all fifty of those minutes. I am not saying that to be kind to you. It is what is written in Isaiah 46:4, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line spoken to worn out people three thousand years ago and lays it under a woman holding two cups she cannot account for. The forty names did not come out of your reserves. They came out of His, through you, and He was never once running low.

The carrying is not a metaphor

I want to be careful with the word carried, because church has worn it thin.

When Isaiah says carried, he is making a joke at the expense of the idols. Two verses earlier the gods of Babylon are being loaded onto oxen for the evacuation, a cartload of objects lifted by the very people they were supposed to hold up. Then God says He is the opposite of that. Everything else you serve has to be carried. I carry.

So the question underneath your Sunday is not whether you are giving too much. It is whether the thing you are standing on is a thing you also have to hold up. And here is the tender part. For a long time now, without ever choosing it, the thing you have been standing on is your own usefulness, which means that every Sunday you have had to carry the floor you were standing on out to the door with you, forty names at a time.

You have a floor under you that you are not required to hold up. Scripture says He made you and He bears you, and it is His Spirit who moves that from a lovely sentence about somebody else into the actual ground under your actual feet in an actual foyer at ten past twelve. You are not standing on your recall. You are not standing on having got the new couple's names right on the second Sunday. You are standing on Someone who was under you long before you were useful to anyone.

Notice what this does not ask of you. Not to stop remembering Margaret's hip. Not to step back, thin out, draw a line, or come off the rota. I am not handing you one more thing to manage. The forty names can stay where they are. What changes is where your own weight rests while you say them.

You are held by God at the door, in the car, and at ten past twelve on a Tuesday nobody asked about. It is written that He bears, and the Holy Spirit is the One who turns a promise into a floor, sometimes slowly and sometimes in a foyer. He knows about Tuesday. He was there for the whole of it. Nobody had to tell Him, and nobody had to remember it on your behalf.