What The Years Actually Did In You

She asked the question out loud in the kitchen last week, to nobody, which is how she asks the real ones.

The question was: did any of it do anything.

Not bitterly. She would want that understood. She has had a long life with a good deal of God in it and she is not sitting out here writing off eighty years. It is simply that she has asked about the same three or four matters for most of that life, and those matters are largely where they were, and she is at an age where a person stops having the patience for a soft answer.

Nobody has ever given her a straight one. She has had a great many kind ones. She has had the timing answers and the mystery answers and one man who told her that God had been preparing her, which she thought about carefully for a week and then set aside.

So here is what she is asking for, and it is not consolation. She wants somebody to tell her honestly whether the praying and the going without and the years of turning up did anything at all, and she is prepared for the answer to be that nobody knows.

And a neighbor said over the fence in the spring: have you fasted about it lately?

She said she had, years back, twice. And what she thought, folding a sheet, was: if I am honest, I am not asking about that any more. I am asking about me.

If you are old enough to want a straight answer, come and sit down out here.

The straight answer, in two parts

Here is the first part, and it is the one nobody says.

Nobody knows why those matters did not move. Not the man who told you God was preparing you, not the woman at the fence, and not this page. Anybody who offers you a reason is handing you a guess in a good coat, and at eighty you have seen enough of those to spot the tailoring.

You are not being given an explanation, and you were never obliged to hold one. That is not evasion. 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 all of it, and He has never once required a woman to construct a reason for Him.

Here is the second part, and this is the one that can actually be said.

The praying was not a mechanism, so it did not fail. There is no ledger where eighty years of asking got weighed and found short. You did not do it wrongly, and nothing about those unmoved matters is a report on you. Scripture is blunt that God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent (Numbers 23:19), and it is His Spirit who makes that a weight off an old woman's shoulders rather than a proposition she could argue.

And what did the years do? Nobody can tell you about the matters. There is one place where something can honestly be looked for, and it is not out in the world.

What Scripture says is still going on

There is a verse about people your age and it is doing something more specific than encouraging them.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.Psalm 92:14

Read the word still.

That word only makes sense if something has been going on for a long time and is continuing. It is not a promise of a late start. It is a statement that a process already under way does not stop, and the psalm sets it in the season a person is usually assumed to be past it.

And notice what the fruit is not attached to. Not to results. Not to whether the things a person asked about came in. It is attached to the person, in old age, still.

You are still bringing forth, at eighty, and that has nothing to do with what did or did not arrive. I am not saying it to flatter an old woman on a porch: it is what the psalm asserts and the word it hangs on (Psalm 92:14), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who does the actual bringing forth, which is why it does not need anybody's permission or notice.

And none of this predicts anything

Here is the plain thing, and at eighty a person has earned it plain.

Nothing here says those matters are about to move. Nothing found in this looking is a sign, and it is not the start of a season, and it tells you nothing about the years you have left.

You are holding no forecast, and nobody here knows anything about what comes next. Scripture says it is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power (Acts 1:7), and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief rather than a disappointment, because a woman not carrying a prediction is carrying a good deal less up a flight of stairs.

Now the thing this site says on every page. 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. 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.