They Wait For Me To Say The Deep Thing

It comes at about half past nine, and it lasts four seconds, and she has been dreading it for six years.

The talking winds down. Somebody says something that could be an ending. And then the room settles, very slightly, and about nine faces turn toward the oldest woman in it, and there is a pause with a shape to it, and everybody in that room knows what the shape is for.

She has a history. She has been in this since before most of them were born and she has seen things that would take an evening to tell properly. That is why the pause exists, and it exists out of respect, and she knows that.

But she is seventy, and some evenings she has nothing. Not because God is far off. Because she is seventy, and she was up at six, and her hip hurt all afternoon, and what she actually has at half past nine is a great deal of tiredness and a genuine fondness for these people.

So she produces something. She is good at it. There is a small store of things she has said before that she can bring out and shape to the evening, and nobody has ever noticed, and every time she does it she goes home feeling like a woman who has sold something secondhand as new.

If a room waits for you to be the deep one, come and sit on the boards. Nobody who turns toward you is going to be criticized here.

An honor that turned into an obligation

Let us look at what the pause has become, because it began as one thing and is now another.

It began as honor. Nine people in a room genuinely wanted to hear what a woman who had been walking this road for fifty years thought about the evening, and that is right and there is nothing wrong with it.

What it turned into, over about six years, is a slot. Slots have to be filled. And once a thing has to be filled, it will be filled from wherever material is available, which is how a woman with fifty years of real history ends up quietly recycling and feeling like a fraud on her own porch at ten o'clock.

Nobody did that to her. It happened the way most of these things happen, by nobody noticing.

You do not owe that room a closing remark. Nothing about fifty years of history has ever obliged you to produce depth on a schedule. I am not saying it to excuse a tired woman. Scripture says my grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9), which is an answer given to somebody asking to have a limitation removed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a woman at half past nine.

The answer given to a man who wanted the limit gone

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off one person in that room.

Read what was actually asked for and what was actually given, because they are not the same thing and that is the point.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:9

He asked three times for a thing to be taken away. What he got instead was a statement that the limitation is where the strength shows, which is not a consolation prize and is not a way of saying no gently.

Made perfect in weakness. That is not weakness tolerated, or weakness worked around. It is weakness named as the place the strength becomes visible, which means an empty evening at seventy is not a failure of supply. It is a location.

You are not disqualified by an empty evening, and Scripture names the weakness as the place rather than the problem. That is written into the answer itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman with a sore hip on her own porch.

Nobody who waits for you is being blamed

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page about nine people whose only fault is love.

They turn toward her because they love her and because she has something they want, and wanting the wisdom of an old woman is not consumption, it is one of the few things a congregation still does well. The pause is respect that has gone slightly stiff, not a demand.

And nothing here is against anybody in that room who is expressive, or quick to speak, or emotional. They are not shallow because they are quicker, and she is not deep because she is old, and there is no ladder on that porch.

What He gave you is not a demonstration. You have nothing to prove in that room. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where every man includes the eight other people on the boards, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the oldest woman present, who is responsible for what an evening holds.

And if these six years have cost more than the neighbors on that porch know, if sleep has gone, if half past nine has started to frighten you, 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.