Room Fourteen, First Day, and I Have to Leave

Her things took eleven minutes to unpack, which you have decided not to think about.

The photographs are on the shelf: the wedding one, the one of your mum on a beach, the one of your grandad in the uniform he only wore twice. Her cardigan is over the back of the chair. Her tin of buttons, which nobody could explain to a stranger, is on the windowsill where she asked for it.

She is in the chair by the window and she is being extremely good about all of this, which is worse than if she were not.

She has said three times that it is lovely. She has said twice that you are not to worry. She asked about your job, which she has never once asked about in her life, and you both know why she asked.

And the woman came in ten minutes ago and said, gently, that they find it is often easier if family do not stay too long on the first afternoon.

So you have to go.

You are twenty-nine. You have never had to do anything like this and there is nobody senior to you in this situation, because your mum lives four hundred miles away and the whole of the last three months has been you.

And you are standing near the door with your car keys in your hand, and she is looking out of the window on purpose so that you can go, and you cannot think of a single thing to say that is not a lie about how soon you will be back.

He said carry, in the first person, four times

Stand there a second. She is looking out of the window and she will not mind three more seconds. I am not going to tell you this was the wrong decision.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit is not standing in room fourteen to accuse a twenty-nine year old: you have done three months of something almost nobody your age does, largely alone, and this afternoon is the end of a very hard stretch and not a betrayal of anything. Nobody in this room is on trial. Not your mum four hundred miles away. Not the woman who said the thing about not staying too long, who was being kind and was almost certainly right. And not you.

Now come and look at a verse where God makes an unusual number of promises in the first person, about one thing.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Count them. I have made. I will bear. I will carry. I will deliver. Four verbs, all first person, all in one verse, all about the same person.

And the word that repeats is carry. Not visit. Not check on. Carry, which is what you do with somebody who cannot walk it themselves, and God says it twice in eleven words.

And look at who it is about. Old age. Gray hairs. This is not a general promise about God's people; it is specifically about the end of a life, and God went out of His way to make it in the first person, four times, so that nobody would think it had been delegated.

The carrying of your nan is claimed by God in the first person, and He said it four times in one verse about people exactly her age. That is not me consoling somebody with car keys in her hand. That is what is written, and how many times the verse says it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in room fourteen on a Tuesday afternoon.

Here is what nobody explains about leaving somebody somewhere. When you speak a blessing over her, you are not making up for going and you are not promising anything about Thursday. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a woman He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He does not leave at four o'clock and He is not going to be told about anything at handover.

A blessing said in that room stays in it after you have driven off. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), settled, past tense, and the Spirit is the one who carries a word from heaven into a room with a tin of buttons on the windowsill, and none of its weight is in how often you can get across town.

Why you cannot find anything to say

Now let me name it, because you have been standing near that door for a reason and it is not that you are bad at this. What is written has a sentence that does not have this problem, and the Spirit is not accusing you of anything.

Everything that comes into your head is a promise. Back on Thursday. Back at the weekend. Every day if I can. And you know, standing there with your keys, that you cannot underwrite any of it, because you work full time and it is across town and there will be a week in February when you cannot.

So every available sentence feels like a lie, and a person will not say a lie to their nan on the first afternoon, so you are saying nothing. What is written contains no promise about you, and the Spirit does the carrying of it either way.

That is not cowardice. That is integrity operating with no material to work with.

A blessing solves it, and it is the only thing that does, because it contains no promise about you at all. It does not commit you to Thursday. It says nothing about how often. It is not a statement about your reliability, and so it cannot become a lie in February.

God is not asking you to guarantee anything to that woman, and He has never once made a granddaughter's visiting schedule the condition of His carrying. It is written that the eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27), and underneath is not a place that requires signing in at reception, and the same Spirit who breathed that is in room fourteen now.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you she is happy about this. I am not telling you it gets easier or that she settles by Christmas, and I have no authority to promise you either. And I am not telling you how often to visit, which is between you and your life and is not a moral test.

What I can put in your hands is this: something can be said in that room that does not depend on you coming back. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and twenty words said over a woman in a chair by a window is not a smaller thing than a promise about Thursday.