Bread With No Instruction

Tuesday is forms day at the community center, and she is the one who speaks both languages, so Tuesday is hers. She stands at the elbow of a family from the fourth floor and turns the housing officer's sentences into their sentences and their sentences back again, and while she does it she is also watching the queue, because the queue is long and the man at the front is getting loud and the tea urn needs filling and somebody's toddler has found the fire door.

She is good at this. Everybody says so. She is the one you go to. She has been the one you go to since she was nine and her own parents needed a child to explain a gas bill, and she has never once, in all the years since, worked out how to be on the other side of the counter.

An old woman in the queue has been watching her. Not the family, her. When the forms are done and the family goes, the old woman steps out of the line, which costs her the place she has held for forty minutes, and comes over, and without a word she takes the younger woman's hands and puts something into them. Flatbread. Still warm, wrapped in a tea towel that smells of somebody's kitchen. Then she pats her cheek, twice, the way you would pat a child, and goes to the back of the queue.

And the interpreter stands there with warm bread in her hands and a hall full of people needing her, and her first thought, before gratitude, before anything, is: what does she want me to do with this?

Because that is what happens to a person who has been strong for a long time. Comfort arrives and gets translated into instruction on the way in. Bread becomes a task. A hand on the arm becomes a request. A verse about being held becomes a thing to be done properly.

You know the feel of that bread. You know the exact half second where the kindness lands and the mind reaches for a job to turn it into, because being comforted is a language you have not spoken in years, and being useful is your mother tongue. That is where this finds you: strong, and standing in a queue, holding something warm you do not know how to receive.

What God said about how He comforts

Let me put the verse in your hands the way the old woman put the bread there, and then let me tell you plainly what it is and what it is not, in the same breath, because you deserve both.

As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.Isaiah 66:13

God chose that picture. Nobody handed it to Him. Now hear the boundary, in the same paragraph as the comfort, because this site does not soften one to warm the other: God is neither male nor female. Scripture says He is not a man (Numbers 23:19), and it says He made both male and female in His image (Genesis 1:27), and it calls Him Father from beginning to end and He never once corrects that. So the mother in Isaiah 66 is a simile, a picture God reached for to tell you what His comfort is like, and it is exactly as true as the text makes it and no further. He is not a goddess. He is not addressed as Mother anywhere in Scripture and He is not addressed that way here. And yet He looked at every kind of comfort there is and said: like that one. Like a mother's. Both pictures, the Father who steadies and the mother who holds, describe one God, and the second is not a correction of the first.

Here is the pit, and I am naming it before anything lifts. You believe God comforts people. You have probably told a dozen of them so, this month, in two languages. What you do not believe, at the level where belief actually lives, is that comfort is a thing that can be done to you without your having to do anything with it. That is why the verse has always read to you like a job description. Comforted in Jerusalem, and you were already working out where Jerusalem is and how you would get everyone there.

You are held. Not assigned, held. I say that from the written verse and not from sentiment: as a mother comforts, so I will comfort you, and the I is God's, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named the Comforter, who takes a line on a page and makes it a pair of arms in a hall full of people. What a mother does with a child in her arms is not give it a task. That is the whole of the picture, and it is His picture.

The bread is not for anything

Watch the old woman again. She did not hand over the bread and then explain what it was for. It was not for the family. It was not for the tea table. It was not a form of payment for the interpreting, and it was not a request for anything to be interpreted. It was for the woman whose hands she put it in, and the pat on the cheek was the translation, and the translation was: this is not for anything. This is for you.

That is what a mother's comfort is, and God knew it when He chose the word. Something can be handed to you that has no instruction attached. And it is precisely the strong who cannot receive it, because a person who has been the interpreter since she was nine has learned that everything handed to her is handed to her to be dealt with, and she is right, almost everything is, and God is the exception. You have nothing to do while you are held. That is not my softness; it is what the word comfort means in the mouth of a God who is not a man and did not lie, and the Spirit is the one who makes it possible for a strong person to go still and let the bread be bread. Nothing to translate. Nothing to file. Nothing to get everyone through.

Now the honest edge, because a comfort that has to be felt to be real is one more job. You may read that verse with your name in it and feel nothing at all. You may hold the bread and stay entirely on duty inside. That changes nothing about what is true. You were comforted before you could translate it, in the same way that the bread was warm before she decided you had earned it; the promise was written for people who had spent seventy years being strong in a foreign city, and it did not wait for their feelings, and the Holy Spirit does not audit yours before He holds you. Being held is not conditional on your noticing you are held.