She Does Not Know Who I Am

Aoife has been going in four times a week for seven years and her mother thinks she is somebody kind from the home.

It started with small things. It always does, and the small things went on for about two years before anybody said a word out loud, and there was a stretch in the middle where Aoife knew and was not saying it, and her mother knew and was not saying it, and they had a whole year of that.

Now it is what it is.

Her mother is content most days. That is worth saying because it is true and because people assume otherwise. She likes the window. She likes a particular chair and she is polite to everybody and she has kept her manners entirely, which Aoife finds almost unbearable and cannot explain why.

And she is lovely to Aoife.

That is the thing. She is warm to her, and glad when she comes, in exactly the way you are warm to a nice person who has come to sit with you. There is nothing cold in that room.

There is just nobody in it who knows her.

Seven years, and no arrival and no ending. That is the shape of it that nobody outside can see. There is no crisis to rally round any more and there has not been for years, and there is not going to be a moment when this resolves, and so the whole of it has slipped out of everybody's view including, mostly, hers.

People ask how her mother is. She has an answer for that and she gives it well.

Nobody has asked how she is in about five years, and the two who have were asking about a week.

In the spring her mother said, in the middle of nothing, "You are very good."

The way you would say it to a carer.

And Aoife said, "Thanks, Mam."

And her mother said, kindly and with real interest, "Is your mother still alive?"

Aoife sat in the car afterward for about twenty minutes and then drove home and did the shopping.

There is a nurse there, a young one, who said something to her a few weeks later on the way out. Not a big moment; she said it over her shoulder while doing something else.

She said: "She settles when you come in. She does not know why. But she settles."

Now let me ask you when somebody last asked about you.

Because if this is yours, everybody asks about the other person, and you answer, and you are good at answering, and the question underneath it has not been put to you in years.

The one who carries

God says something in Isaiah 46 that is aimed directly at people who are getting older, and it does something almost nobody notices about who is doing the work.

The chapter opens with idols being carted off into exile. That is the image: gods strapped to animals, a burden on the backs of tired beasts, being carried out of a city that has fallen.

And then this.

Even to your old age I will be the same, and even to your graying years I will bear you. I have done it, and I will carry you; and I will bear you and I will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Count the verbs.

I will bear you. I have done it. I will carry you. I will bear you. I will deliver you.

Five, in one verse, and every single one of them has God as the subject and you as the object. There is not one thing in that sentence that the person being addressed does.

And it is set against the idols, which have to be carried. That is the whole argument of the chapter: the false ones are cargo, and this one is the carrier, and the difference between them shows up at exactly the point where the people are old and tired and there is nothing left to give.

Even to your graying years. Not until. Even to. The carrying does not stop when the season stops being interesting to anybody.

So hear this said over you, sitting in a car park for twenty minutes before driving home to do the shopping. You are being carried by God through the seven years in which you have been the one doing all the carrying, and the invisibility of it to everybody else has never once made it invisible to Him. That is written in a verse with five verbs in it and not one of them yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Helper and who intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, which is what He does in a woman who has run out of sentences.

Now let me be careful with the nurse's sentence, because I could ruin it.

I am not going to tell you that means she knows you underneath.

I do not know that. Nobody does, and there is a whole industry of people who will tell you they do, and I am not joining it, because if I tell you your mother is in there somewhere recognizing you, and you go in tomorrow and there is nothing, I have made it worse and taken your money for it.

Here is what the nurse said, exactly. She settles when you come in.

That is a fact and it is enough on its own. It does not have to mean recognition to be true, and it does not need to be turned into something larger before it counts.

And I am not going to tell you what God is doing with these seven years.

No reason. No lesson. This is not for anything I can name, and if I named one I would be handing you a guess and dressing it up.

Here is what I am telling you.

There is nothing in that room that is not being seen.

You have been operating for years on the reasonable evidence in front of you: nobody asks, nothing changes, there is no arrival, and the only person who could have thanked you cannot. From inside that, it is very hard not to conclude that the whole thing is happening nowhere.

It is not happening nowhere. It is happening in front of the God who describes Himself, at exactly this point in the life of exactly these people, as the one who carries.

The word says He is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, and it says it about people still in the middle of it. And the Spirit of God is the Helper, and the word means somebody called alongside, which is a spatial word about where He is standing.