Three Phone Calls Before Noon

The first call came at ten past eight. Deborah was still in her housecoat, holding the blue cup with the chip in the handle, standing at the screen door watching the light come up over the fence line. It was her oldest. The transmission had gone on his truck and the estimate was eleven hundred dollars, and he said the number the way men say a number when they are really saying something else. She listened. She said the things you say. She did not say that eleven hundred dollars was what stood between her and the roof.

The second call came at twenty to ten. Her middle one, her daughter, crying in a parking lot with the engine running. Twelve minutes of it. Something about her husband's mother, and Thanksgiving, and a sentence somebody said back in June that has been hanging in that house ever since like a wet coat nobody will take off the hook. Deborah carried the phone out to the porch and sat down in the wooden chair with the arms worn smooth, and let the crying come through the little speaker into her ear, and said the things you say to that as well.

The third came at a quarter past eleven. The youngest. He did not cry and he did not ask for anything, and that was the worse one, because she could hear underneath the talk that he was in the kind of trouble a person does not put a name to on the phone to his mother.

Then it was quiet.

The coffee was cold. It had been cold since the second call and she drank some of it anyway, because it was there. The light had gone high and hard and moved off the porch boards onto the grass. Behind the house a dog barked twice and gave it up. She had not eaten. She had not gotten dressed. The washing was still in the machine from last night and had that smell they get.

She sat in the chair and did not get up, and what she noticed, sitting there, was that she was still holding all three of them. Not the phone. Them. The transmission, and the wet coat sentence from June, and the thing the youngest would not say. All three were in her chest at the same time, stacked one on another, and it was twenty past eleven in the morning and there was a whole day left and no place to set any of it down.

There is nobody I can call, she thought.

Not because nobody loves her. Because she is the one people call.

The weight goes around, not up

There is a line in Galatians that usually gets read at people who are already carrying too much. Bear one another's burdens. Said out loud in a certain tone, it lands like one more job on a woman who already has three jobs in her chest before lunch.

But look at who it was written to. Not to the strongest person in the room. To a whole body of people, plural, all of them doing it in every direction at once. The weight in that sentence is moving sideways, around a circle, hand to hand. It is not going up a ladder to the one at the top who never gets to hand anything to anybody.

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.Galatians 6:2

You are one of the one anothers. That is not a clever reading, it is what is written plainly in Galatians 6:2, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line a person has heard at fifty church services and sets it down inside them as a fact about their own Tuesday morning. The sentence has you inside it. It never had you standing outside it holding the clipboard.

Somewhere in the years, the arrangement got fixed. She is the strong one. She is the one who does not come apart on the phone. Nobody decided that in a meeting. It happened the way a path gets worn across a lawn, one crossing at a time, until the grass is gone and everybody uses it without thinking about it. And a worn path is not a covenant. It is only where people have walked.

You were never made to be the floor of three households at the same time. Scripture does not ask that of anybody, and the Holy Spirit does not hand out an assignment and then decline to carry any of it. What is written is that the everlasting arms are underneath, and underneath is a position, not a mood. Something has been holding the whole weight of her three since before the first call came in.

What she is actually doing in that chair

Here is the thing about that morning, and it matters, because it is not what it looks like from the road.

She is not failing to love her children. She loves them exactly right. She listened to all three, she said the true things, she did not hurry any of them off the phone. Nothing about those calls was wrong and nothing about them needs to stop. Her people are allowed to call her. That is not the trouble in the chair.

The trouble in the chair is that she took delivery of three loads and never signed one of them over. She is standing at the counter of a depot with three crates on a trolley, and there is a window right in front of her with the light on and somebody behind it, and she has not gone up to the window, because she has been on this side of the counter so long that she forgot she was ever a customer.

You are free to hand these three across to the One already carrying them. Not tomorrow, when the washing is out and the house is straight. Right where you are, in the middle of the smell of last night's laundry, because Psalm 55:22 says cast thy burden upon the Lord and He shall sustain thee, and there is not one condition set in front of the word cast. The Holy Spirit is not waiting for a tidier version of a person to come to the window.

And handing it over is not the same as letting go of the people. The transmission goes over. Her son stays. The June sentence goes over. Her daughter stays. Whatever the youngest is not saying goes over, and he stays, and she keeps his number in her phone and answers it at midnight if it rings. What leaves her chest is the weight, not the child.

You have somewhere to set your weight down that is not another person's shoulder. The written word calls Him the God who daily loadeth us with benefits, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is in the room where the chair is. Nobody has to wait for a second human being to arrive with a casserole before they are allowed to stop holding everything, though God does send those, and often.