The Card in Your Own Handwriting

There were nine of them round the table and the pudding had come out, and her grandson was telling everybody what he does now.

He was three sentences in when she lost the thread. Not the subject. The words. Three of them in a row that she had never heard used that way, said easily, the way you say bus stop, and everybody else at that table nodded along and asked him something sensible, and the talk went on.

She said, that's marvelous, love. Then she stood up and started collecting the pudding bowls, which is a thing you are allowed to do at any point in any conversation on earth without anybody wondering why.

She has been careful for a while now. She asked once, about two years ago, what a word meant, and her son in law explained it beautifully and kindly and slowly, and she has never asked again. It was not the explaining. It was the second and a half before it, when the table went quiet and everybody arranged their faces.

So she does the plates. Hands in the hot water, tap running, the window over the sink gone white with steam. Behind her the talk keeps rolling, and she can hear that it is happy, and she cannot get in.

She was the one they rang, once. About a temperature, about a christening, about whether you can freeze it. Three of the people in that room learned to pray with their eyes shut in her front room. She is not bitter about any of it. She has simply arrived, quietly and without telling anybody, at a conclusion: the things she knows are not the things anybody needs now, and by the time the youngest ones are grown there will be nothing of hers left worth handing on.

She opened the drawer by the kettle to look for a tea towel and found the card.

Her own handwriting. Fourteen years old at least, the ink gone brown, one corner soft as cloth and a ring on it where somebody had stood a cup. Her daughter had written a line underneath in biro: Mum says do not skip the salt.

And here is what you did with that, because it was you at the sink.

You looked at it for a second and a half, and then you put it back in the drawer, face down, and you dried your hands and you carried the teas through, and you did not say one word about it to anybody. Because a recipe card is not the same as being needed. Because you are frightened, in a way you have never once put into a sentence, that you have run out of things to give the people you love.

The words moved. The thing you carry did not.

Let me say the true thing plainly, because plain is what I have, and clever has had its turn at that table already.

Going quiet at that table was not stupidity and it was not pride. It was self protection, and it worked. Nobody at that table has the faintest idea that anything happened, because a woman collecting bowls is invisible in the best way, and that has been the arrangement for two years.

But underneath it there is a piece of arithmetic running, and it is worth saying out loud where you can look at it: the words have changed, therefore I am out of date, therefore what I have is out of date, therefore I have nothing to hand down.

Every step of that follows so smoothly from the last that it feels like sense. It is not sense. The join between the second step and the third is where it snaps, and it snaps because it assumes that what you have to give is made of the same material as the words, and it never was.

You are not behind, and there is nothing to catch up to. The old man in Psalm 71 asks for one thing when he thinks about his gray hair, and it is not to be current: it is to show God's strength to the generation coming after him, and showing strength is a different act entirely from keeping up with a vocabulary. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that verse land on a woman with her hands in a washing up bowl.

Here it is whole.

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

Sit in that for a moment. The man is old, he says so, he is not pretending otherwise. And what he asks God for is not relevance. It is not to be understood. It is not to be able to follow the conversation. It is a purpose, in the present tense, aimed at people who are not born yet, and he clearly assumes he still has one.

Nothing in that sentence is about vocabulary. It is about strength shown, which is a thing done in front of people rather than explained to them.

You have something to hand down, and it was never made of the words. Scripture says faith comes by hearing, and the hearing that starts a person off is somebody near them saying a true thing in an ordinary voice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns that into faith rather than the fluency of whoever said it.

Nobody was ever asked to be current

Think about what actually crossed over to you.

Somebody taught you how to hold steady when the news is bad. Somebody showed you, probably without one word of instruction, what a person does at four in the morning when there is nothing to be done: you make tea, you sit, you do not fill the silence with opinions. Somebody let you see them pray about something that did not get better, and keep praying, and not go bitter.

Now try to remember the words they used. You cannot, and it does not matter in the slightest, because none of it came across in the words. It came across because you were in the room.

And that has no right to stay in your head as a small thing. The written word says a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, and the language of that is passing on rather than performing, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been carrying what you passed on into rooms you have never stood in.

The talk at that table was about work, and work has always had its own vocabulary that shuts other people out. Your grandmother could not have followed a word of what you did at your busiest either, and it took nothing from her, because nobody in that family was learning how to live from her job description.

You were not left behind when the words changed. Scripture calls Him the same yesterday, today and for ever, and the steadiness a family actually runs on is His and not the era's, and His Spirit has not once required anybody to be up to date before He would use them.

And the fear underneath all of this is not really about words at all. Say it properly: it is the fear of being finished. Of having become somebody who is fetched from the car and sat in a chair and asked kind questions, rather than somebody with anything left to give.

You are still on the list of people God is using this week, and it is not a sentimental list. Psalm 92 says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, they shall be fat and flourishing, which is not the way anybody writes about a person who is finished, and it is His Spirit who does the flourishing and not your ability to follow the conversation.