The Week My Mother Died

It was written on the calendar in the kitchen in green pen, because green was the pen that lived by the phone.

Sunday 14th. 11am. Bring towel.

She had written it three weeks before. She had told four people, which for her was a parade, and one of them was a woman at work who had cried, and she had bought a towel specially, a proper one, navy blue, because the ones in her bathroom were all thin and one had a hole in it and she was not going to turn up somewhere important with a bad towel.

On the Tuesday of that week her mother went into hospital with what everybody, including two doctors, believed was a chest infection.

On the Thursday her mother died.

She was there. That is the one mercy in it and she has held onto it for twelve years. She was there at ten past four in the morning holding the hand that had held hers, and she had said the things, and her mother had squeezed once, and then there was the long part where the room is very quiet and a nurse is very kind and somebody brings you a cup of tea you do not drink.

She went home at half past seven. And there on the kitchen wall, in green pen, in her own handwriting, was Sunday.

She did not take it down. That is a detail she has never told anybody, because she cannot explain it. That calendar stayed on that wall until the following January and every day for eleven weeks she walked past Sunday 14th, 11am, bring towel on her way to the kettle.

The navy towel went in the airing cupboard. It is still there. It has never been used, not once, not for anything, and it sits under the spare pillowcases and every so often she moves it to get at something and puts it back.

Twelve years. She has been in a hundred services since. She has sung, and she has meant it, and she has prayed for other people and seen God answer for them. She loves Him. That was never the question.

But the fourteenth is a locked room, and every time anybody near her arranges anything at all, some small quiet part of her that she is not proud of thinks: do not put it on a calendar.

Nobody is asking you about the calendar

Listen to me, because I am going to say this once and plainly and then I am going to stand on it for the rest of this page.

I am not asking you to reschedule anything.

Not today. Not at the end of this. There is no gentle turn coming where I take your hand and walk you toward a diary, and if you close this page in nine minutes having arranged precisely nothing, this page has done its whole job. The calendar is not the subject. You are.

And here is what is true of you, right now, before anything is arranged, while that towel is still under the pillowcases.

But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.Isaiah 43:1

Do you see what God does in that sentence? He does not call her by her situation. He calls her by her name. You are called by your name and not by your worst week, and that is not a comfort I am offering, it is the word of God, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is going into your chest instead of past your eyes.

And look at the tense of it. I have redeemed. I have called. Thou art mine. Finished, finished, present. There is no pending item in that verse. There is no line in it that reads "as soon as she gets round to it".

Now let me say the thing I think you most need somebody to say out loud.

That week did not disqualify you. It did not put a mark on you, and it did not start a clock, and God did not interpret your absence on the fourteenth as anything at all, because He was in the room at ten past four in the morning and He knew exactly where you were.

You were being held that week. Not overlooked. Held. The Spirit of God was in that hospital room with you and in the kitchen at half past seven when you saw the green pen, and Scripture says He is near to the broken hearted, and near is not a word for someone keeping score of appointments.

I want to touch the towel, because I think you have been quietly ashamed of the towel.

You have kept an unused thing in a cupboard for twelve years. You have moved it, and put it back, and never once used it for an ordinary purpose, and somewhere in you there is a voice that calls that ridiculous. It is not ridiculous. It is a woman refusing to let a thing become ordinary, and there is more love in that than in half the sensible things people do.

But hear this over it. You are not waiting for permission to be His. You have not been in a holding pattern for twelve years while heaven waited on a rearranged Sunday. Scripture says you are His, present tense, and the Spirit inside you is God's own deposit on that, and a deposit is not a promissory note that lapses if the date slips.

And one more, because I think this is the real one.

You have been afraid to write anything down. That small voice at every arrangement, the one you are not proud of, is not a character flaw. It is a woman whose calendar once had the worst week of her life written on it in her own handwriting, and who learned in eleven weeks of walking past it that a plan is a thing that can be taken. That fear is understandable and it is also not the truth, and the truth is that the God who called you by your name is not on anybody's calendar and cannot be taken off one. Isaiah says God has called you by your name, and the Holy Spirit was in that kitchen at half past seven when you saw the green pen.