What My Sister Brings

She comes the first Saturday of the month, and she has done since about 2009, and she comes with a bag, and in the bag there is always a cake and always a bottle.

The cake is because she is a better baker than Norah and always was, and they both enjoy that. The bottle is because in their mother's house you never went anywhere empty handed, and a bottle was what you took, and Bernice has been taking a bottle to people's houses since she was twenty two years old.

Norah is seventy four. She stopped four years ago, quietly, at seventy, which surprised a great many people who had never noticed there was anything to stop.

Bernice does not know. That is the truth of it. There was no announcement, and there was nothing to announce, because it had never been the sort of drinking anybody comments on. It was a glass in the afternoon that had become two, and then it had a shape to it that Norah did not like, and she stopped.

And every first Saturday the bag comes in and the bottle comes out of it and goes on the side, and Norah says, oh, you shouldn't have, and Bernice says, well.

And then it stays on the side all afternoon, and afterward it goes in the cupboard with the other three.

You know that visit. It might be a sister, a neighbor, a son in law, an old friend. They mean it kindly. They have been doing it for years. And the fact that it is kind is exactly what makes it impossible to say anything.

You are able to build a house a course at a time, and you were never required to change it in one conversation. The Proverb says through wisdom is an house builded, and by understanding it is established, and building is slow deliberate work rather than a single decision; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that available to a woman of seventy four on a first Saturday.

Through wisdom is an house builded

Let me say the honest thing first, the way I would at my own table.

The reason you have not said anything is not cowardice. It is that there is no sentence available that does not turn your sister's forty year old habit of kindness into a mistake she has been making. She would be mortified. She would apologize about eleven times. She would bring flowers instead and she would be careful with you forever, and you would have traded four bottles in a cupboard for a sister who handles you.

That is a real calculation and you have made it, and I am not going to overturn it from a page. I will say only this: if you ever do say something, you will find that a sensible woman of seventy something can be told a thing plainly and simply put a different item in the bag. But you do not have to, and today is not about that.

Here is the proverb.

Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding it is established: and by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches.Proverbs 24:3-4

Builded. Not decided. Not declared. Built, which is a word about time and courses and one thing set on another until the thing stands up.

You are building rather than deciding, and you were never being asked to settle a house in a single afternoon. That is what stands written in Proverbs 24, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a delay for a woman who has been looking for one conversation that would fix a Saturday.

And then established. That is a different word and a later stage: made firm, made to stand, settled on its foundation. A thing gets built first and established afterward, and both of them take time, and neither of them happens in a moment.

You are inside a process with stages and you were never behind on it, because building and establishing were always going to take a while. Scripture names two separate stages, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the hurry out of a woman who is seventy four and inclined to feel she should have sorted this out by now.

And the third line, which is the one I would want at my age. By knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches. The rooms get filled. Not emptied. The passage is not about clearing a house out; it is about a house being built, standing, and then filling up with good things. That is a promise about accumulation, and it is made to somebody who is doing slow work.

You are filling rooms rather than emptying them, and you were never handed a house whose only future was subtraction. The written word ends on the chambers being filled, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real direction of travel at seventy four.

And now the plain thing, said as I would say it to my own sister. Four years and nobody knowing is a long stretch of doing something on your own. Tell somebody. Not necessarily Bernice: a friend, your doctor, the group in the church hall on a Thursday. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and there is no age at which it stops being sensible to have one person who knows.