Everybody Would Know Something Was Wrong

She has sat in the same place for fifty years, and that is exactly the problem.

Third row, right hand side, second seat in. Her husband sat beside her for thirty eight of those years and the seat has been empty for twelve, and there is not a soul in that building who does not know precisely where she sits.

So when the invitation comes, she does not move, and her reason is not fear and it is not doubt. It is arithmetic. If a woman who has been in one seat for fifty years stands up and walks to the front, that walk is a sentence, and everyone in the room reads it, and by the time she gets to the car park four people will have asked her, kindly, whether everything is all right.

And there is something wrong. That is what nobody knows. There is a thing she has been carrying since the spring and she has told exactly no one, because she has spent fifty years being the one people tell things to, and there is no established route in that congregation for it to run the other way.

She is eighty one. She has begun to wonder, without saying it, whether the season for God to do anything much with her closed some while back and she simply did not notice at the time.

If your own seat has become a place you cannot get up from, come and sit on the porch. Nothing about that invitation, or one person who has ever answered it, is going to be run down here.

The privacy is real and it is not the whole problem

Let us be honest about both halves, because only one of them is doing the damage.

The first half is true. A walk to the front from her seat really would be an announcement, she really would be asked about it in the car park, and wanting to keep a thing private at eighty one is not vanity or pride. It is a reasonable person protecting something.

The second half is the one that has quietly settled underneath, and it is not true at all: that because she cannot ask publicly, she has no way to ask, and that a woman this far along is past the part of the arrangement where God does anything new.

You are not past the season. Nothing about eighty one years, or fifty in one seat, has ever closed God's dealings with you. I am not saying that to be kind to an old woman on a porch. The written word says even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you (Isaiah 46:4), which puts His carrying at exactly the end of the road rather than the start, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a woman who has been in one seat since her twenties.

The verse that starts where she is

Here is what turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody who walks that aisle.

Read where God places Himself in that sentence, because it is not where a promise usually gets placed.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Even to hoar hairs. That is gray hair, and it is named on purpose. This is not a promise made to somebody starting out, with the long useful years ahead of them. It is spoken directly into the part of a life that people quietly assume is the winding down.

And look how many verbs He puts in it. I have made, I will bear, I will carry, I will deliver. Four, and three of them are still future tense at the point of gray hair.

You are addressed exactly where you are standing, and Scripture keeps three of His verbs in the future at the far end of a life. That is written into the sentence itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it onto a porch on a summer evening.

Nothing here is against going up

Something has to be said plainly, or this becomes a dignified way of never moving again.

That invitation is good, and the people who answer it are not making a show of themselves. Several of them have walked up that aisle with everybody watching and it cost them something to do it. If a Sunday comes when you want to go, go, and this page will not put one obstacle in your way.

The relief is not that the front stopped mattering.

You can ask from the seat you have held for fifty years, and asking there takes nothing off one person walking to the front. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth (Psalm 145:18), where the condition is truth and not publicity, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not who notices, who carries what a woman asks.

And if what you have been carrying since the spring has gone past what a person can hold alone, if sleep has gone, if you are frightened, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people, and telling one doctor is not the same as telling a congregation.