One Page and the Words Slide

The lamp still has the pull cord, which is how you know how long Ruth has been sitting in this chair.

It came from her mother's house. The shade is the color of weak honey and it throws a circle about the size of a dinner plate onto the arm of the chair, and for something like fifty years that circle has had a book in it.

Every night. Not as a discipline. Not as a thing she was proud of and mentioned to people. Just the way the day ended, the way other people have a last cup of tea. Twenty minutes, forty on a good one, and then the pull cord and up to bed.

Tonight she has been in the chair since twenty past nine, and it is now twenty to eleven, and she is on page four.

She read the first paragraph of page three, and then read it again because she had not got it, and then a third time, and by the third time she was reading the words while thinking about the fact that she was reading them for the third time, which is its own kind of trap.

The words are all still there. That is the thing she cannot make anybody understand, on the rare occasion she has tried. It is not that she cannot see them. It is that they will not hold still and stack up into a meaning. They slide. She gets to the end of a line and the beginning of it has gone somewhere.

The ribbon is two pages further in than it was three weeks ago.

She looks at that ribbon quite often now. It sits there in the front of the book like something left at the scene.

Behind her the shelves go all the way up. There is a shelf of the ones she has read more than once. There is a gap in the middle of the third shelf where a book has been out on loan since before Christmas and neither party has mentioned it.

Ruth is not confused. She knows exactly what she has lost and she has not said it out loud to a single person, partly because she does not want anyone taking her book off her, and partly because of what she is afraid they would say. They would say something kind. That is what she cannot stand. They would say something kind and slightly brisk about how everybody's concentration goes, and then the subject would be over, and she would still be sitting here at twenty to eleven on page four.

She puts her hand flat on the open page. The paper is cool.

Fifty years of ending the day like this. And she is not ending the day like this anymore, and there is nothing to hold a funeral for, because nothing has died and nobody has gone and the lamp still works and the books are all still on the shelves.

The circle of honey colored light sits on the arm of the chair with a book in it. Ruth does not pull the cord yet.

Scripture has a line for this, and it does not add a lesson

There is a verse near the end of Ecclesiastes that I want to put in front of you, because of what it does and, much more, because of what it refuses to do.

In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened,Ecclesiastes 12:3

That is a body. The keepers of the house are the hands and they are trembling. The strong men are bowing. Those that look out of the windows are darkened, which is the eyes going.

Now notice the sentence around it. There is no rebuke in it. There is no exhortation. Nobody in that chapter is told that the trembling is a discipline problem, or that a bit more effort would steady the hands, or that this is happening for a reason that will be explained to them if they hold on. The Holy Spirit put the plain fact of a body doing less into the book and left it standing there without a single word of blame attached to it.

You are inside a page of Scripture, not outside the reach of one. That is not my consolation, it is what Ecclesiastes 12:3 actually is, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about darkened windows and sets it down beside a lamp with a pull cord.

I am not going to tell you this comes back. I do not know that, and a person who tells you they know it is handing you their guess and calling it a promise, and you would be the one left holding it when nothing changed.

And I am not going to tell you to make peace with it either. Nobody gets to stand outside your life and issue a verdict on what you should have finished grieving by now. That is your loss. It is allowed to be a real one, tonight, in a chair, at twenty to eleven.

You have the right to grieve this, and nothing in the written word asks you to call it something smaller. Scripture itself takes a whole poem to say that a body does less than it did, and His Spirit is not standing behind the chair waiting for you to be philosophical about it.

What was never in the reading

Here is the thing I want to say carefully, and it is not a consolation prize.

For fifty years the reading was one of the places you met God. In the circle of lamplight. In the quiet after the house went down. That is real, and I am not going to pretend the loss of it is a small administrative change.

But the meeting was never held up by the reading. The reading was the room it happened in. It was not the reason it happened, and it was never the qualification.

Think about the man in Ecclesiastes with his hands trembling. Nothing in that chapter suggests God got further away from him as the grinders ceased. The book does not describe a person losing their standing in step with their eyesight. It describes a body doing less, in the presence of the same God, who has not adjusted His posture toward the person by a single degree.

You were never valued for your capacity, and the last three weeks did not change your standing with God by anything at all. That is what is written rather than what I would like to be true for you, and the Spirit of God does not measure a soul against what it managed on page four.

This is yours tonight, in the chair, with the ribbon where it is. The word gives it without conditions and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an ancient line arrive in a room with a pull cord lamp in it, at the actual hour a person is sitting there.