Easy To Have Around, Easy To Skip

He is the one everybody says is easy. He has been told it his whole life and it has always been meant as a compliment.

Easy to have around. Low maintenance. Never a bother. He has heard all three of those about himself from four different people in the last two years, and two of them said it while he was standing there and one of them said it to somebody else in a way he was clearly meant to hear.

It is true. He is easy. He does not make a fuss, he does not need much, he adapts, he says the restaurant is fine, he takes the small room without mentioning it.

He is fifty and he has been like this since he was about eight, and he could not tell you the year it started and could not tell you the reason, and this article is not going to guess at the reason and neither should anybody else.

Here is the cost, which he added up in a hotel room in February at a conference he did not want to be at.

He was on a bed with his shoes off looking at a ceiling and he went through the last year, and what he found was this: he had not been asked how he was, properly, once. Not by anybody. Not by his brother, not by anybody at work, not by the three men he has known since school.

And it is not because they are cold. It is because he is easy.

That is the whole mechanism and it took him until fifty to see it. The people who get asked are the people who register. Somebody who is having a hard time registers. Somebody difficult registers. Somebody who makes a fuss about the restaurant registers.

A man who is easy does not produce a signal. He is exactly as visible as a room that is at the right temperature, which is to say not at all, and being not at all visible is not a thing anybody does to you. It is a thing that happens around you, constantly, for forty years, without a single unkind act.

He said, out loud, in the hotel room: it worked.

And then he lay there for a while, because he was not sure what he had meant by that.

You know the arrangement. Yours may look different from the outside. But you know what it is to have made yourself easy so long ago that you cannot find the decision, and to have worked out, much later, what it bought and what it cost.

A remembering that does not need a signal

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an instruction to start making a fuss it will be both useless and slightly ridiculous.

The pit is not the easiness. The easiness is real and it has made you good company and it has kept peace in rooms that would not otherwise have had any, and at least four people in your life are better off because you took the small room.

The pit is what a man concludes after forty years of not registering. Not that he is disliked; he knows he is liked. Something quieter and worse: that being noticed requires producing something, and that he has never produced it, and that therefore whatever attention he has had has been the ordinary courtesy people extend to furniture that is exactly the right height.

And that conclusion goes upward. That is why we are here rather than talking about hotel rooms.

Here is the verse.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.Isaiah 49:16

Ask what produced that.

Not a signal. Not a fuss. Not a difficulty presented, not a need announced, not a crisis that registered. God did that, to a people who had just said He had forgotten them, and He did it by His own decision about His own hands.

Graven is cut. The mason's word. It is not a note somebody made when something came up; it is permanent, in the place He works from, in front of Him whether anything is happening or not.

And the verse before it takes the measure of it.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.Isaiah 49:15

I will be careful with that clause. God is not accusing anybody's mother, and this article makes no claim about yours or about the year you became easy. He takes the strongest bond in the world He made, says even that can fail, and sets Himself past it.

Here the line goes in the same paragraph, because on this ground the picture never travels without it. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Isaiah 49:15 is a comparison God chose to say something about His own remembering. It does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays exactly the shape He gave it. Scripture reaches for a father's language for Him constantly and a mother's deliberately, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it is His own.

Take that on the hotel bed, and know it is not my consolation, it is what is written. You are remembered without ever having produced a signal. Isaiah 49:16 has a name cut into a palm with nothing on your side of it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that down into a man who worked out at fifty what forty years of easiness cost.