She Thinks the Window Shut at Sixty

The swing has a squeak in it on the back stroke that she could fix with a drop of oil and does not, because she likes it, and because a porch with no sound in it is a long afternoon.

Across the road they are loading a van. Young people, a lot of noise, somebody's cooler going in sideways and coming back out again. She watches it the way you watch weather.

She used to be in that. Not in a van, exactly, but in it. There were twenty-some years when she was the one with the list: who needed a ride, who had not been seen in three Sundays, whose mother was in the hospital in Johnson City and whose boy was not doing well. She taught the ten and eleven year olds for a long stretch. She could get a casserole to a house before the family got home from the funeral, and she knew which door to use.

Then at some point around sixty it started to feel like she was in the way. Nobody said so. Nobody has ever said so, and she wants that understood. It was small things. The class went to a curriculum on a screen. The lists went onto somebody's phone. Somebody younger and very kind said, we have got it, you have done enough, sit down. And she sat down, and then she kept sitting down, and it has been eleven years.

She prays now. She would tell you that, if you pressed her, and she would say it in a tone with an apology folded into it, the way people say I just do the flowers. She has a spiral notebook with names in it and she goes down that list every morning in the chair by the window, and she has never once counted that as the work.

The nineteen year old from the house on the curve came up and sat on the swing beside her in July. Just sat. Then asked her something, a real question, about whether it is possible to forgive somebody who is not sorry, and got a real answer, because the woman on the swing has known the answer to that for forty years and has paid for knowing it.

The girl sat there a while afterward and then went home and did something about it, and that is the whole story, and the woman on the swing does not know any of that, and if you told her she would say, oh, we were just talking.

Across the road the van doors slam and the horn goes twice and off they go.

You know that swing. Yours might be a chair or a kitchen window, and yours might have come at sixty or forty or thirty-five, but you know the arithmetic: the useful part is behind me, and the good years were the ones where I was on the list, and now I am a person who sits down.

The old tree in the courtyard

There is a psalm written for the Sabbath, and it ends in a place nobody expects a Sabbath song to end. It ends in a courtyard, looking at a tree.

The picture is of a palm and a cedar planted inside the house of the Lord, which is to say planted in the one place where somebody is responsible for them. And then the psalm says something that ought to be read out loud on porches:

They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green.Psalm 92:14

Still. Not once did. Not used to. Still, in the present tense, out at the end of a life, with the trunk gone rough and the bark split and the tree plainly old to anybody walking past.

You are a tree that is still bearing, and the age of the trunk was never the measurement. I am not saying that to be nice to you on a slow afternoon. It is written, in that psalm, in the present tense, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the prettiness of the image, who takes a line about a courtyard and sets it down on a porch swing with a squeak in it.

And look at where the tree is standing, because that is the whole engine of the verse. Planted in the house of the Lord. It is not bearing because it is trying harder than the young trees, and it is not bearing because it got itself into good soil by being clever about it. It is bearing because of where somebody put it, and it was put there and it has never been moved. You have been planted, and planted is a thing done to you and not a thing you achieved. Scripture says planted in the house of the Lord, and it is His Spirit who keeps sap moving in a trunk that any passerby would call finished.

What you were bought for is not a debt

Now, this is the last thing this site has to say to you and it is the one it exists to say, so I am going to say it slowly.

You know what you were bought out of. You could tell me the shape of it. That part you have thought about for years, and probably too much, and I am not asking you to go back over it.

What you have almost never thought about is what you were bought for. And the reason is not laziness. It is that somewhere along the way "purpose" got tangled up with "making it up to Him," and once those two are tangled, a person who feels they have a lot to make up for and not many years to do it in will quietly conclude that the window has shut. That is the arithmetic on your porch. That is why you sat down.

Hear this. What you were bought for is not a repayment plan. It is not service rendered against an account, and it is not you working your way back into usefulness, and it is not God getting some return out of you before the end. You have a purpose that was never a debt, and nothing you do this week is owed to anybody. His word says you were bought and made His workmanship, created for good works He prepared in advance for you to walk in, which is a sentence about His planning and not about your catching up, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person hear that without immediately reaching for the ledger.

And the specific thing being handed back to you this afternoon is smaller than a calling and much more useful. It is the next assignment. The one with your name on it this week. Not a ministry, not a role, not a title on a board somewhere. The nineteen year old on the swing. The name in the spiral notebook that keeps coming back around. The door you know to use.

You are holding an assignment that is current, not a memory of one, and it was put in your hands by somebody with the right to hand it over. It is written that they still bear fruit in old age, and the Spirit is the one who takes a present tense verb and makes it apply to a Tuesday in July.

The eleven years happened. The sitting down happened. The kind young person who said you have done enough said it, and meant it well, and the record of all of it stands exactly as it is. And the verdict on you is not "retired." The record stands, and the verdict is changed.