Four Rotas And No Invitation

Her name is on four lists in that building and she has checked, more than once, and it is spelled right on all of them.

Welcome. Kitchen. The Tuesday group, which she runs. And the one nobody ever calls a rota, which is the list of people who get rung when somebody is in hospital.

Four.

There was a meal in June. Not a church meal; a meal, at somebody's house, for about fourteen people, most of whom she serves alongside every single week. She found out because two of them were talking about it in the kitchen afterward, not unkindly and not secretly, in the ordinary way people talk about a thing that happened.

It is the third year in a row.

Not the same meal. A meal, an evening, a weekend somebody organized, once a year or so, and she has not been at any of them, and she has never once been deliberately left off anything by anybody.

She has told herself it is an oversight three times now. The first time she believed it entirely. The second time she believed it. The third time she heard herself say it and did not believe it, and that is what has changed, and that is why she is reading this.

She is forty one.

Here is what she has never said out loud and would find very hard to say to a person: I think I am staff.

Not friend. Staff. Warm, valued, appreciated, thanked at Christmas, and on the working lists and not on the other kind.

She has thought about whether she is being unfair to them and she has decided, honestly, that she probably is being slightly unfair, and that being slightly unfair does not make the pattern go away.

You know the four lists. Yours may be at work or in a family. But you know what it is to be on every list that involves doing and on none of the ones that involve being wanted, and to have run out of ways to explain it to yourself.

Not a list anybody administers

Let me name the pit before we go to the text, because if this becomes a case against fourteen people it will do you no good at all.

The pit is not the meal in June. It is a sentence you have never said: I think I am staff. And what makes that sentence so heavy is not hurt feelings. It is that it is a conclusion about what you are to people, and a conclusion about what you are to people does not stay with people. It goes upward, quietly, and starts describing what you are to God, and a woman who serves in four places will not notice it happening because she is busy.

Here is the verse.

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

Notice, first, that this is not a list.

A list is administered. Somebody keeps it, somebody adds to it, somebody forgets, and somebody has to be asked to check. Every list in your life is like that, including the four, and there is not one of them where a human being is not standing between your name and the page.

This is a name cut into a hand. Graven is the mason's word: cut into stone, permanent, not written and not typed and not maintained by anybody. There is no administrator between you and it, and there is no version of it where somebody forgets to add you when they are putting the numbers together for a Thursday.

And the verse before it takes the measure.

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 want to be careful, because there is a lazy reading here and this article is not taking it. God is not accusing anybody's mother, and this is not an invitation to go looking through your own history. He holds up the strongest bond in the world He made, says that even it is capable of failing, and then 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 a title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays exactly as 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.

You are named and not merely rostered, and you were never on His hands as a pair of them. Isaiah 49:16 cuts a name into a palm rather than onto a duty sheet, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a woman who has been on four lists and off one.

Take that in the kitchen where you heard them talking, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written. Your name is cut into the hands of God and there is nobody standing between you and it. Isaiah 49:16 has no administrator in it anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that below the head into the place where a woman decided she was staff.