The Apron She Could Not Tie

The hall smells of toast and washing up liquid and thirty children, and she has run this breakfast club for six years without missing a Saturday, and this morning she cannot tie her own apron.

It is the sling. A fall on the back step, a wrist in plaster to the elbow, and a consultant who used the word weeks in a way she did not like. She has done the shopping one handed. She has carried the milk in from the car one handed. She has set out thirty bowls and thirty spoons and she has waved off the two other helpers who said, gently, that she should have stayed at home, because she does not stay at home. Everybody in this building leans on her. That is simply the shape of the room. She is the one who carries, and she has never once in her adult life worked out how to be the one who is carried, and she is not about to start with an apron.

So she is behind the hatch, with the strings in her one good hand, trying to do a knot behind her own back with her teeth and her elbow and her stubbornness, and it is not working, and thirty children are about to arrive.

A boy of about seven is already there, early, because his mum has a shift. He watches her for a while with the frank interest of a child watching an adult fail at something. Then he comes round the hatch and holds out both hands, sticky, and says, "I can do a bow. My nan taught me."

And she nearly says I've got it. It is at the front of her mouth. It is the sentence she has said to every offer for forty years. But the strings are behind her back and the toast is burning and the boy is standing there with his hands out, and something in her gives way like a knot slipping. She turns round. He ties it. He ties it beautifully, in a double bow, tongue between his teeth, and steps back to look at his work with his whole face lit up like he has done something for the queen.

You know that hatch. You have your own sling, your own thing you cannot do this week that you have always done, and your own child, or friend, or neighbor, standing there with their hands out while I've got it sits in your mouth. This is your Saturday. Turn round for a minute.

Four men and a roof, and the first word He said

Hear me, you who carry. I know your kind, because a room is full of you and nobody sees you until you stop. I am not going to tell you to let people help. That has been said to you a thousand times, by people who did not understand why you cannot. I am going to show you a man on a mat, and what Jesus said to him, and I am going to let that do the work.

And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven."Mark 2:5

Read it slowly, because there are two things in that one verse that will undo you if you let them.

The first is their. When Jesus saw their faith. Not his. The man on the mat did nothing in this story except lie there and be carried. Four men picked him up, four men pushed through a crowd, four men climbed on a roof and dug through it with their hands and lowered him down on ropes into a room full of strangers, and the text says Jesus saw their faith. The carried man contributed nothing but his weight. And that was enough. It was more than enough. Heaven counted the carrying as faith and it counted for the one being carried.

The second thing is the first word. Not sinner. Not cripple. Not you should have got here yourself. Son. Before He healed him, before He said a thing about his legs, Jesus looked at a grown man who had just been lowered through a ceiling in front of a packed house, at the lowest and most helpless and most watched moment of his life, and the first thing out of His mouth was a word of dignity. Son. He was named family before he was named healed.

You are named exactly like that, right now, on your mat, in your sling, with the strings behind your back. That is not me being kind. It is written, in Mark's own account, that the first word to a man being carried was a word of honor, and the Holy Spirit is the one who speaks that same word into you the moment you let somebody take the other handle. Being carried does not lower you. In this story it is the posture in which a man heard himself called son.

Now, the honest part. The ache under all of this is not really about aprons. It is this: if I let them carry me, I stop being the one who carries, and I do not know who I am if I am not that. You have been useful for so long that useful has become your name, and you are afraid that if you are lifted for one hour, you will be set down as somebody smaller. I am not going to talk you out of that fear by telling you to be less proud. That is not what this is. This is a person who has never once been shown that being carried can be done with honor, because nobody ever carried you well.

The most famous steadiness in the Bible was three men

Let me show you one more thing, because it is the thing that undoes me every time I read it, and it will undo you.

Moses on the hill, hands raised, the battle turning on whether his hands stay up. And Scripture says, plainly, his hands were heavy. The greatest leader Israel ever had, and his arms gave out. So they put a stone under him, and Aaron stood on one side and Hur stood on the other, and they held his hands up until the sun went down. And the verse says his hands were steady. Steady. The word for that steadiness is the same word we get amen from. Firm. Held. It will not give.

Do you see it? The most famous firmness in the whole story of God's people was not one strong man. It was one tired man and two friends and a stone somebody found for him to sit on. Moses was not steady because he was strong. He was steady because he was held, and you are built the same way, because it was written down so we would know how strength actually works. His Spirit does not steady a person by making them need nobody. He steadies them by sending Aaron and Hur, and sometimes Aaron is seven years old and his nan taught him bows.

Hear me, and hear me loud, because I want this to reach the part of you that flinches. The strength you have been trying to generate on your own was never the strength God gives. His word says His power is made perfect in weakness, and the Spirit's whole way of working is through bodies beside bodies, hands under hands. He does not want you to be a pillar standing alone in a field. He wants you to be a person with a stone under her and a friend on each side. That is not the lesser picture of strength. It is the only one He ever drew.

I am not going to promise you that a helper is always going to be standing there. Some Saturdays the hall is empty and the strings stay behind your back, and God sees that too, and He does not grade you for it. But when a boy holds out sticky hands, hear me: that is not an insult to who you are. That is Aaron, sent.