They Are Grown And Gone Now

The second job came up when the youngest was four. Evenings, four nights, and it would have made a real difference, and you turned it down in about ninety seconds without ever really deciding.

That was twenty-two years ago.

You have thought about it perhaps four times since, and never for long, and never with regret, because you knew then and you know now that four evenings a week is not a small thing to take out of a house with three children in it.

Two of them are married. One is in another country. The youngest, who was four, is twenty-six and rang you last Sunday and talked for forty minutes about a difficult woman at her work.

And on Thursday you stood in your own kitchen at seven o'clock and did not know what to do.

It was not grief exactly. You have had grief and it is not this. It was that seven o'clock has had a job in it for twenty-two years and it does not have one now, and you have never once, in all that time, had a name for the job other than them.

That is what has been quietly working away at you since the spring.

Nobody ever said: this is what you are becoming. They said, you are a good mother, which is a true thing, and which describes a relationship rather than a person, and which stops applying in the ordinary way when everybody is grown.

So you have twenty-two years of evenings and a house at seven o'clock, and you are fifty-four, and you would not swap one hour of it, and you cannot say what it made.

Paul says you are the thing being made

There is a sentence in Ephesians that most people read as being about salvation and stop reading halfway through, and the second half of it is about a workshop. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:10

His workmanship. The word underneath it is the one we get poem from: a made thing, worked on, finished by somebody's hands over time.

And then unto good works, which are described as prepared beforehand, and the verb for what a person does with them is walk. Not achieve. Not complete. Walk in them, which is what you do with a road that is already there.

Now hold that against twenty-two years of evenings.

The evenings were not the finished thing. You have been assuming they were the achievement and that the achievement is over. His word says you are the workmanship, and the evenings were the hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been doing the making, and a thing that has been made for twenty-two years is not finished at the moment it is finally ready.

What twenty-two years actually did

Let me be plain about this, because I am plain about most things and it usually helps.

You think those years went into three people and that the three people have now left. And they did go into three people, and they left, and that is right and that is what was supposed to happen.

But the workshop was not their bedrooms. The workshop was you.

A woman does not spend twenty-two years of evenings on other people's needs without becoming a particular kind of woman. It is not possible. Something got made in you and nobody has ever named it, because we do not have a way of talking about it, and because you did not do it in order to become anything.

Ask yourself who telephones you. Ask yourself who, in your street and your church and your extended family, ends up at your table when something has gone wrong. Notice that it is not random, and that it has been quietly increasing for about five years.

You are His workmanship, created unto good works prepared beforehand. That is what is written and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been at it, and a house that is quiet at seven o'clock is not a house with nothing in it.

What was preached in a plain hall

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and one of the things preached in that plain room was being wholly set apart to God.

Where that teaching has gone wrong, and it has gone wrong plenty, is that it gets preached as a subtraction: here is what a set-apart person does without. Preached that way it hands a woman a list of empty evenings and calls it a calling.

It could not work that way in that hall, because that hall had missions running in the streets around it, and a person who had made room in her life was being asked, that same month, to put both hands into something specific.

Set apart there meant available, and available always had an address attached.

The written word calls you a made thing walking in works prepared in advance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who prepared them, and twenty-two years of evenings was a workshop and never a waiting room.