Forty People And Nobody Remembered

It was the ninth. Nobody said anything, and she was in that building for six hours.

She wants two things understood before anything else, and she would say them in this order.

The first is that she is not sulking. She is forty three years old and she has not expected a fuss about a birthday since she was about twenty, and if somebody had made one she would have found it slightly excruciating.

The second is that these are good people. There are about forty of them in the part of that church she gives her weeks to, and they are not selfish and they are not cold. Two of them would drive through the night for her and she knows exactly which two.

Here is what actually happened.

She was in on the Wednesday from ten in the morning. She set up for the thing at two. She sat with a woman for an hour who is going through something that will not have an ending. She stayed after to lock up and to talk somebody down about a rota.

And at about eight o'clock she drove home and let herself into a house where nobody lives but her, and she stood in the hall with her keys in her hand and said, out loud, in a completely level voice: "I could be replaced by a rota."

That is the sentence. Not, nobody remembered my birthday, which is a small and slightly embarrassing thing and would not have stayed in her.

I could be replaced by a rota.

Meaning: what they need is the function. Meaning: if the function were performed by somebody else it would make no difference to that building, and therefore, and here is the leap that happened in her hall in about two seconds, there is nothing about her in particular that is being loved.

She has not told anybody. Who would she tell. She is the one people tell things to.

You know that hall. Yours may not involve a church. But you know what it is for a day to go past unmarked and for a conclusion to arrive that has nothing to do with the day, and to be standing somewhere with your keys in your hand saying something out loud that you would never say to a person.

He set His remembering against the strongest thing He could find

Let me name the pit before we go to the text, because if this becomes an article about a forgotten birthday it will be beneath both of us.

The pit is not the ninth. It is the sentence in the hall, and the sentence has been forming for years and the ninth simply gave it a night to arrive on. And it is a specific fear, and it is not self pity: it is the fear of being loved in the way a function is loved, which is a real thing that happens to capable people and which nobody in that building would ever guess at.

Here is the verse, and notice what God is doing with 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

He is not making a general statement about His good memory. He is holding up the strongest bond in the created world, the one every human being would name if you asked them for the least forgettable relationship there is, and He is saying: even that can fail, and I will not.

That is a claim with a stake in it. He picked the highest bar available and then set Himself above it.

And this needs care, and I am going to give it care. The clause about a woman forgetting is not an accusation aimed at anybody's mother, and it is not an invitation for you to go looking through your own history for evidence. This article makes no claim at all about your family, and I do not know them, and God is not using them to make His point. He is using the strongest bond He created, in general, as a measure, and then going past it.

Here I draw the line 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 as He gave it. Scripture uses 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.

And the next verse tells you how the remembering is kept.

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

Graven. Cut in. On the hands, which are the part that does everything else, which means it is not somewhere He has to go and look.

Take that in the hall with the keys, and know it is not my comfort, it is His own sentence. You are remembered by God in particular, and not as a function. Isaiah 49:16 has a name cut into a palm, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that below the head into the place where a woman decides what she is to anybody.