Her granddaughter asked her a question in July that she has not been able to answer since.
They were in the front room. There was tea. The girl is twenty six and she was asking about the old days the way they do, and somewhere in the middle of it she said, quite lightly: "Nan, who looked after you?"
And she said, "Oh, we all just got on with it."
Which is what she always says, and which is true, and which the girl accepted because it sounded like an answer.
She has been trying to answer it properly ever since.
She has gone back through it, year by year, in the chair, at the hour after lunch when there is nothing on. She looked after her mother from fourteen. She looked after her brothers, two of them, until they went. She looked after her husband, and his mother for six years, which nobody in that family has ever fully understood the length of. She looked after four children and then, for a stretch in the nineties, two grandchildren three days a week.
She looked after a neighbor with no family at all for the last eleven months of that woman's life and did not tell anybody she was doing it.
She is eighty five.
And she cannot find one. Not one occasion, in eighty five years, that she can point to and say: there, that day, somebody looked after me.
There must have been. She says that to herself. There must have been and she has forgotten, and probably her mother did when she was small, before things went the way they went, and that is very likely true and she cannot get at it.
What she can get at is a great deal of being needed, and being useful, and being thanked, which is not the same thing and she has always known it was not the same thing.
You know that question. You may be much younger and it may have arrived differently. But you know what it is to go looking for one instance of being cared for and to come back up out of the years with your hands empty.
The one being comforted is not doing the work
Let me name the pit before we open the book, because if this lands as a complaint about her family it will be a lie, and she would put it down.
Nobody has failed her. That is not what this is. The people around her are good and they love her and half of them are the way they are because she made them so. The pit is different and it is quieter: a woman can go eighty five years in the position of the one who does the looking after, and the position sets, and by the end there is no longer any way in.
So here is a sentence in which the person being cared for is doing none of the work.
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13
Read who is doing what.
There is one comforting. There is one comforted. And the one comforted is not helping, not managing, not thanking, not being useful, not making it easy. Nothing at all is asked of her.
And notice who chose that comparison. God did, about Himself, in the first person. Nobody offered it to Him.
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 66:13 is a simile God chose to say what His comfort is like. It does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays in the form 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.
Take that in your own chair, and know it is not me being soft with an old woman, it is His own sentence. You are being comforted by God, and you are not doing any of the work in it. Isaiah 66:13 puts the whole of it on His side, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, and He has been doing it for eighty five years in a woman who could not have told you when.
You have been in one position for eighty five years and there has been no way in.
You are looked after, and you were not overlooked in the eighty five years you spent looking after everybody else. Isaiah 66:13 puts the comforting entirely on His side and puts nothing on yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that comforting, and He has not been waiting for a gap in your usefulness.
That is not your fault and it is nobody's fault, and there is no point at your age in going round assigning any. It is just true, and it means the way in is not going to be through a person, because a person is a conversation, and in a conversation you will be back in your chair doing the looking after inside a minute. You would do it now, at eighty five, from that chair, with a blanket on your knees.
So take the one place where the other party is God.
He does not need anything from you. He is not tired, He is not visiting, He does not have to be back by four, and you cannot put the kettle on for Him. There is nothing you can do for God this afternoon, and that is not a diminishment of you, it is the only condition under which a woman like you has ever been able to receive anything.
You are being looked after right now, in that chair, and you have not arranged one bit of it. That is Isaiah 66:13 with the doing entirely on His side, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, and He is not being kept from it by a woman who cannot remember being comforted.
And your granddaughter's question in July. She was not accusing anybody, and she was not asking you to be sad. She asked because she loves you and because at twenty six people start noticing what the old people in their life have been carrying.
It is a good question and it has a proper answer now, and the answer is not the one you have been searching the years for. Somebody has been looking after you, from before you were fourteen and there was a mother to be got up in the night for, and the answer is God, and He has been doing it in a great many hours that you filed as ordinary.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in your own chair. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a position you have held for eighty five years is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your being able to remember one instance of being cared for. These stand on what is written in Isaiah and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by anybody's memory. How He does this, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Position I have held for sixty years and more, you are not the whole of me, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Isaiah 66:13 says God comforts as a mother comforts, and the one being comforted in that verse is not helping in any way at all.
- Empty hands I came back up out of the years with, you are not the true account. It is written that He chose that comparison Himself and that He is neither male nor female, and His Spirit has been doing the comforting since before I was fourteen, in hours I filed as ordinary.
- Lord, You comfort me the way a mother comforts, and I have arranged none of it. I sit in this chair and read it out loud with my own name in it and I stay down for a minute, and I let whatever wants doing want doing.
Isaiah 66:13
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