His cousin said it in passing, at a table, assuming he knew.
"So when does Hisham go?"
And he said, without any change of expression, because he has had a good deal of practice, "The end of the month, I think." Which was a guess, and turned out to be right, and nobody at that table noticed anything at all.
His brother is moving to another country. It had been decided for three weeks. Their mother knew. Two of his cousins knew. A man from the mosque that Hisham used to work with knew, which he found out later and which was somehow the one that stayed with him.
He is forty six. He is not estranged from anybody. He was at that brother's wedding and he stood up and spoke, and it was good, and there is a photograph of the two of them from that day on his mother's wall.
He is simply the last one told. Always. About everything.
He has thought about why, and the honest answer is not a grievance. It is logistics. He works long hours and he is not on the family group, having left it two years ago when it got to two hundred messages a day, and he lives forty minutes further out than the rest of them, and he is the calm one, so nobody ever rings him in a panic, and news travels by panic.
There is nothing to accuse anybody of. He has been through it and there is nothing there.
And underneath the reasonableness, something has been quietly setting for about six years, and it came up in the car on the way home from that table.
He thought: I am not somebody people think of.
Not disliked. Not excluded. Just not in anybody's mind unprompted, the way a person can be entirely in a family and never once be the first thought.
And then, because he is a believing man and because these things run together whether we let them or not, a second thing arrived behind it, and this is the one worth writing about: I have started assuming that is how God has me too.
You know the position. Yours may be a workplace or a street. But you know what it is to be reliably last, for reasons that are nobody's fault, and to have a conclusion form out of it that is not about logistics at all.
A name cut into a hand
Let me name the pit before the verse, because if this becomes a complaint about your family it will be dishonest and you would put it down.
The pit is not neglect. You have already done that investigation and found nothing, and you were right. The pit is that six years of being reliably last has produced a conclusion about your own weight in the world, and that conclusion has quietly transferred to God, and it did that without ever being examined because it never announced itself as a doctrine.
Here is the verse, and it is one of the strangest things God says about Himself anywhere.
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. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.Isaiah 49:15-16
Take the second half first.
I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands. Graven is not written. It is cut. It is the word for what a mason does to stone, and what is cut into a hand is not something that gets overlooked in a busy week, because it is on the hand that does everything else.
Now the first half, and it needs care, and I am going to give it care.
God asks whether a woman can forget her nursing child, and the expected answer is no, and then He says: yea, they may forget. He is not making an accusation about anybody's mother, and this article is not about yours, and I do not know a thing about her and neither does anybody else reading this. He is saying that even the strongest bond He can point to in the created world is capable of failing, and then He plants Himself on the other side of that: yet will I not forget thee.
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 the strength of 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 in the car on the way home, and know it is not my consolation, it is what is written. Your name is cut into the hands of God, and it is not on a list that gets forgotten in a busy week. Isaiah 49:16 uses the word for cutting into stone, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence like that down out of the head and into the place where a man decides what he is worth.
You have been reading a logistics problem as a verdict on your weight in the world.
You are not last in the one place where the telling actually matters, and you were never waiting on a cousin for this. Isaiah 49:16 says a name is cut into His own hands, which puts it in front of Him permanently and not in a chain of who rings whom, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that into a man who has stopped being surprised.
That is the shape of it, and you have already done half the work yourself, because you have identified every one of the reasons and found nothing to accuse anybody of. What you have not done is go back and take the conclusion out. The reasons got audited. The conclusion never did.
And it has moved, which is why it matters more than a group chat.
So put your name where God says it is.
You are cut into His hands, not written on a list, and there is no week busy enough for that to slip. That is Isaiah 49:16, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land somewhere lower than the head, in a man who has spent six years finding out things three weeks late.
And your brother. I am not going to turn this into a project about the family, and I am not going to tell you to raise it, because you are a wise man and you will know whether and when.
What I will say is that the man who stood up and spoke at that wedding, and did it well, is not a man nobody thinks of. He is a man who is not on a list. Those are different, and one of them is about you and the other is about a group chat you left two years ago for entirely good reasons.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud with your name on your hand. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a conclusion six years old is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on anybody in your family behaving differently. These stand on what is written in Isaiah and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your standing in any room. When any of it changes, and how, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Conclusion I drew from being told last, that I am not somebody people think of, you are not what God has done with my name, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Isaiah 49:16 says He has graven me on the palms of His hands, and that is cut in, not written down.
- Transfer that happened without my noticing, from a group chat to the throne of God, you have no ground in this car. It is written that they may forget, yet will He not forget thee, and His Spirit is the one who takes that below the head, which is where the conclusion went.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female and You have graven me on Your hands. I have written my own name on my palm and read it out loud over it, and I am not carrying a logistics problem as a verdict any longer.
Isaiah 49:16
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