She Went Alone to Prove She Could

Jo gets there eighteen minutes early, which is the amount of early she has been arriving at things since she was twenty-four.

The waiting room has two chairs against the wall under the high window and four more across from them, and she takes the far one of the two because it is nearest the corner. Afternoon light is coming in above the blind in a long slab and landing on the floor about a foot in front of her shoes.

She takes her coat off. And without a single conscious thought about it, without deciding anything, she puts the coat on the chair beside her.

Marian had offered. Twice, actually, which is the part Jo keeps going back over. The first time on Sunday, lightly, the way you offer something you expect to be taken up. The second time on Tuesday night at twenty past nine, less lightly: I can drive, I will just sit in the waiting room, you would not even have to talk to me.

And Jo had typed three different answers and sent the fourth one. Honestly, I am fine. It is a five minute thing. I will call you after.

She meant it kindly. She did mean it kindly. Marian has her own week and a son taking his exams and a mother of her own, and it is a five minute appointment, and there is a bus that goes practically to the door.

That was the reason she gave. It was not the reason.

The reason is sitting here with her now under the high window, and it is this. If Marian comes to this, then Marian sees. And what Marian sees is not really the appointment. It is a woman who cannot get to an appointment on her own anymore. And once that has been seen it cannot be unseen, and after that Jo is somebody people arrange things around, and there is a version of herself in Marian's head that has changed, and she has no way of changing it back.

So she came on her own. And she is fine. She got the bus and she is eighteen minutes early and she has her card in the front pocket of her bag where it always goes.

Somebody comes through with a clipboard and calls a different name, and a man opposite gets up.

Jo looks at the chair beside her with her coat on it. She did not put it there for any reason. There was a hook by the door.

She looks at it for a while, at the sleeve hanging down, at the shape of it slumped on the seat, and something goes through her that she does not have a word for and does not like, and she looks back at the slab of light on the floor instead.

Eleven minutes.

The reason she gave was not the reason

I want to start where nobody usually starts, which is that the independence is not the problem here and nobody is going to be told off for it.

Getting yourself places on your own is a good thing. It has been a good thing your whole life. It is not pride, it is not stubbornness dressed up, and I am not going to reframe forty years of standing on your own feet as a character flaw that has finally been exposed by a bus timetable. The people who do that to a tired person do real damage.

The thing under it is smaller and much more frightening than pride. It is arithmetic. If somebody helps me, then I am somebody who needs help, and if I am somebody who needs help then I have moved down a category, and I do not get to come back up.

That arithmetic is doing all the work in the message sent at twenty past nine on Tuesday, and it is wrong.

You are held at full value in that waiting room, and being helped takes nothing at all off the total. That is not my reassurance, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line off a page and settles it into a woman with her card in the front pocket of her bag.

Here is the line.

For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.Ecclesiastes 4:10

Notice what it does not say. It does not say woe to the one who accepts a lift up, and it does not divide the two people into a strong one and a weak one. It says if they fall. Both of them. The lifting goes in whichever direction the falling happens to go that day, and the man on the floor this morning is the man doing the lifting on Thursday, and Scripture treats that as the ordinary shape of two people rather than as a transaction with a debtor in it.

You have never once been demoted for being the one on the floor, and the written word does not carry a category you could fall into. The Spirit of God is not running an audit on how much you have needed lately.

The woe is not aimed at you

I want to be careful about the middle of that verse, because it can land badly on the very person it was written to comfort.

Woe to him that is alone when he falleth. If you are reading this and there is no Marian, if the honest situation is that there is nobody free, nobody near, nobody you could ask without it costing more than the asking is worth, that line is not a verdict on your life. The woe in it is not a scolding. It is God noticing that falling alone is harder, and grieving it, which is a very different thing from blaming somebody for it.

And there is something else standing in that room that does not depend on anyone's schedule. The One who wrote that line about a fellow to lift you up did not write it from a distance. He is the One who is beside a person in an afternoon waiting room whether or not the second chair is occupied, and He is not somebody who has to be asked twice, or who has a son taking his exams, or who might find it inconvenient this week.

You are accompanied this afternoon, and the accompanying does not wait on anybody being free. That is what is written rather than what I am hoping for you, and His Spirit is the One who is in the chair beside a woman in a room where the light comes in above the blind.

This is yours in the eleven minutes you are actually sitting in. The word gives it now, not on the day the arithmetic in your head finally gets sorted out, and the Spirit is the One who makes an old line arrive in a real room at a real hour.