The Child I May Not See Grown

She is eighty four and the baby is nine months old, and she has done the arithmetic more times than she will admit to anybody.

Not in a morbid way. She is not frightened of dying and she would tell you so plainly and she would mean it. It is simply that she can count, and there is a number of years in front of her that is probably not enormous, and there is a small girl at the other end of a very long road that she is not going to walk much of.

So she has been trying to put something in place.

That is the honest description of what she has been doing since the spring, though she would not have used those words at the beginning. She has been praying differently. Longer, more carefully, more like a woman drawing up something legal, as though the years she will not be here for need covering in advance and she is the one who has to arrange the cover.

And a neighbor said over the fence in June: have you ever fasted for that little one?

She said she had thought about it. And what she actually thought, standing there with the washing in her arms, was: yes, that might be the thing that reaches further than I can.

If you have been trying to arrange a covering for years you will not be in, come out here and sit down.

What has been going on since the spring

Let us say it gently, because it came out of love and it deserves to be handled that way.

She has been building. Storing something up. Trying to lay down enough now to cover a stretch of road she will not be walking on, on the understanding that a stretch nobody is covering is a stretch at risk.

And the impulse is beautiful and it is completely understandable, and it is also very tiring for a woman of eighty four, and it has quietly changed the praying from something warm into something anxious.

You are not the one covering those years, and they were never left to anybody to arrange. That is not a soft word offered to an old woman with the washing in her arms. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been on that porch through the whole of the spring, and He has never once been short of coverage for a child.

What already reaches into those years

There is a short verse at the end of a psalm everybody knows, and the last clause of it is the one you need.

For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.Psalm 100:5

Read the tenses, because that is where the whole answer is.

His mercy is everlasting. Not: will be extended. It is already the sort of thing that does not run out. And his truth endureth to all generations, which is a phrase about reach: it is not describing something that has to be sent forward by somebody, it is describing something that is already there in every generation it arrives at.

That little girl is going to be forty in a decade you will not see, in a world you cannot picture, and the mercy will already be there when she gets to it. Not because you arranged it. Because it endures, which is what the verse says it does.

You are not required to reach into a decade you will not be in, and that reach was never yours. I am not saying it to comfort somebody about dying: it is what the psalm states about God's own durability (Psalm 100:5), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes it a real rest for a woman rather than a nice thought about the future.

And going without does not build a covering

Here is a thing that has to be said plainly, because of exactly where that question at the fence landed.

Going without food does not build anything that outlasts a person. It is not a covering laid down over a child's future and it never was, and if it were, then it would need to be maintained by somebody, and it would run out when you did, and that is a terrible thing to hand an eighty four year old woman.

You are not laying the foundation under that child's life, and you never were. Scripture says other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 3:11), and it is His Spirit who makes that a real division of the work rather than a line in a hymn, and there is nobody else named in that sentence.

Now the sentence this site says everywhere and means. Some folks must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. Age, diabetes, medication, any hard road with eating, being frail, underweight or unwell, or simply not sure: speak to your doctor and let what they say be the answer. And a woman of eighty four needs feeding, not one more thing taken off her. You are not one step further from God on account of a doctor's advice. The word says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to a woman because of what her body can do.

And if today has more in it than a page can hold, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not going around God. That is help He put in this world on purpose.