I Thought This Was Behind Me

The oilcloth on the kitchen table has a pattern of small blue flowers and there is a worn patch by the corner where forty years of elbows have gone, and Marilyn is looking at the worn patch because she cannot look at anything else.

It is twenty past seven. She has been sitting here since a quarter to. She has not made anything. The kettle boiled a while ago and she heard it and did not get up.

She is sixty eight years old.

That is the fact sitting in the middle of the room, larger than anything else in it. Not the night. The number. Thirty one years ago she stopped, and she stopped properly, and she has stood in kitchens and said the word thirty one to people who needed to hear that it could be done, and last night in this house, on a Tuesday, for no reason she can point at and with nobody here, it happened.

She has no framework for this. That is the honest description. She is not frightened and she is not even ashamed exactly. She is bewildered, in the way a person is bewildered when a thing they had filed under finished walks back into the room and sits down.

And underneath the bewilderment, in a voice that sounds like her own, is the sentence: then none of it was real. Thirty one years and all of it was a delay, and this is what you actually are, and you have been telling people a story.

The sun has come round to the edge of the table. It gets to the oilcloth at about half past.

Let me stop and speak to you plainly, because that is all I have ever had.

I am not going to ask you how long it had been. There is no count on this site and there will never be one. I am not going to say anything about starting again, because I do not believe you are at a beginning, I think you are a woman sitting at her own table in the middle of a long and real life. And I am not going to tell you what last night means, because it does not mean what it is telling you it means.

You are still standing on a rock that somebody else set your feet on, and you were never the one holding yourself up there. The psalm says He brought me up out of a horrible pit and set my feet upon a rock, and every verb in that sentence belongs to God; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that as true at sixty eight as it was at thirty seven.

He set my feet upon a rock

Let me say the thing that is actually happening in you, because it is not the thing anybody would guess.

The hardest part of this morning is not the drinking. It is that a story you have been telling has come apart, and the story was true, and its coming apart feels like it takes the truth with it. Thirty one years happened. They were real. You did not imagine them. But right now something is standing in your kitchen insisting that a single night can reach backward and cancel three decades, and that is not how anything in the world works, and it is certainly not how God works.

So let us look at the psalm, and let us count the hands.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

Brought. Set. Established. Three verbs, and every one of them has God as the subject. The man in the psalm is the object of every single action in the sentence. He is not described climbing. He is described being brought up. And the rock is not one he found; it is one his feet were set upon.

You are standing somewhere you were placed, and you were never the one who did the placing. That is what is written in Psalm 40, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that plain to a woman at a kitchen table who has spent this morning trying to work out where she went wrong.

Now, established my goings. That word means made firm, made steady. It is about walking, which is a thing you do over years, and it is described as work God did, not a state the man achieved. Which means the thirty one years were not your achievement either. They were His establishing, and a thing God established does not become fictional because of a Tuesday.

You have thirty one real years behind you and you have them as His work, and you were never running them on your own strength. Scripture says He established my goings, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a woman from handing back something God did just because a night went badly.

And here is the one I most want you to have. The psalm opens: I waited patiently for the Lord, and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. Inclined. He leaned down. That is a picture of somebody bending toward a person who is below them and cannot come up. And the psalmist puts it in the past tense, as the thing that started the whole rescue, and there is nothing in the text to suggest God has since straightened up.

You are being leaned toward this morning, and you were being leaned toward in the pit before there was one good thing to report. The written word says he inclined unto me and heard my cry, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the posture of God current in a kitchen at twenty past seven.

Now I will say the plain thing, and at my age I am allowed to say it twice if I like. If your body is in a bad way this morning, go and see a doctor today and tell them the whole truth about the drinking. At any age, and particularly at ours, do not make decisions about your body or about stopping on your own. That is not weak faith, that is good sense. And beyond the doctor: the friend who has known you thirty years, the counselor, the room in the church hall on a Thursday, the number you can call, all of that is God's kindness with a face on it. He has held more people up through a neighbor's hands than through anything dramatic, and He is not embarrassed about it, so neither should we be.