I Have Said It About Everybody Else

She has a coat for it. Navy, good wool, and it has been to more gravesides than she could count and it still smells faintly of the inside of a church.

She has stood at the front and read for people. She has stood at the back and held somebody's arm. She has, on nine or ten occasions, been asked at short notice to say a few words because the person who was going to could not, and she has done it every time, and she is good at it in a way nobody would ever compliment out loud.

And she says the same thing. Not the same words. The same thing.

She says it about the person in the ground. She says it plainly, with real conviction, in a voice that carries to the back, and everybody there hears a woman who means every syllable of it, because she does.

She is eighty-one. She has been doing this since her forties.

And she has never once said it about herself.

Not out loud, not in a room, not to any of the six people she would trust with anything. It has never been asked of her, which is the odd part: nobody asks the woman with the coat. She is the one who says it about other people. That is her role in that community and it has been for forty years and she has been glad to have it.

What she noticed, about eighteen months ago, standing at the back of a crematorium with her hands in that coat, was that she has spent four decades declaring somebody else's hope out loud in public and has never done the equivalent for her own.

And she is eighty-one, and there is not an unlimited amount of time in which to correct an omission like that.

Turn the sentence round

I want to start with what forty years of that coat has actually been.

You have been standing in front of grieving people and telling them the truth at the worst hour of their lives, at short notice, without being asked twice, since your forties. That is a ministry and it has a name in Scripture and nobody in that community has ever put it on a list.

So nothing here is going to suggest you have been withholding something. You have given away, publicly, in a voice that carries, the single most important thing you know, nine or ten times at short notice and countless times otherwise.

What is being noticed today is one asymmetry, and you noticed it yourself eighteen months ago, and you are right about it.

Here is the verse I want to put next to it, and it is a strange one for an old woman and it is exactly right.

Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.Psalm 71:18

That is a man in the last stretch asking for one specific thing.

He is not asking for comfort and he is not asking for length. He is asking to be kept until a job is finished, and the job is showing what God is like to the people coming after him.

Shewed is the word, and it is a demonstration word rather than a teaching word. You do not show somebody a doctrine. You show them something happening.

You are somebody God keeps for the sake of a generation that is watching, and that is not encouragement for a woman of eighty-one, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the crematorium rather than on a psalm you have very possibly read at a funeral.

Now let me say the thing about the asymmetry, and it is not a criticism, it is arithmetic.

You have declared it about the dead, publicly, hundreds of times. You have never declared it about yourself, once, in private.

And the people who have heard you do the first thing have never once heard you do the second, which means that in forty years, the community that knows you best has heard you say that this is true about everybody except the one person whose interior they have never had access to.

You are permitted to put your own name in that sentence. Scripture puts the showing of God's strength to the next generation as the reason an old person is kept, and the Spirit of God has kept you in that coat for four decades, and there is no version of that psalm in which the showing excludes the one doing it.

I want to say one more thing, and I want to be careful with it because you are eighty-one and I am not going to be dramatic about time.

You said there is not an unlimited amount of it. That is true and you said it calmly and it does not need softening.

What I would add is that the thing being corrected takes about forty seconds. It is not a project and it does not need a room or an occasion or anybody to be told, and it can be done today, standing up, in the house you are already in.

You are somebody God keeps for the sake of a generation that is watching, and the psalm says so in an old person's own words. Scripture uses a demonstration word rather than a teaching word, and the Holy Spirit has kept you in that coat since your forties.