I Outlived The Body In My Stories

You have stopped telling the good ones.

Not deliberately. You start them, and about two thirds of the way through you hear how it is landing and you bring it to a close early, and everybody says something kind, and you change the subject.

The one about the river. The one about the winter you walked to work for eleven weeks. The one about carrying your sister's boy the whole way back.

They are good stories and they are true and you have not finished one properly in about three years.

Here is what you hear when you tell them now, and I do not think you have said this to anybody.

You hear the gap. You hear a woman describing a body that is not in the room, to people who are looking at the body that is, and somewhere in the middle of the telling it stops being an adventure and starts sounding like a list of things that are over.

And the worst part is what you imagine they are thinking, which is probably not what they are thinking at all.

So you stop early, and you make it small, and you say something like, anyway, that was a long time ago.

I want to take that sentence away from you, and put something else in its place, and the something else is physical.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age

There is a line in the psalms about the old that is not a comfort exactly. It is a description of ongoing output.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing. (Psalm 92:14, King James Version)

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be full of sap and flourishing.

Still. That word is doing the work. Still means the production has not stopped, and the sentence is in the present and the future rather than in the past.

You have a verse that puts an old woman in the present tense, and Psalm 92:14 has never once described the aged as a people whose account is closed. The word is still bring forth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a life producing after everybody has quietly filed it.

You are able to see what that does to the stories, because it changes their tense.

The stories are not a record of a finished life. They are the earlier chapters of a life that is still going, told by the person still living it, which is an entirely different genre.

And look at the image the psalm chooses. It is a tree, planted, still full of sap. Not a monument. Not a museum. A living thing that is slower and thicker and still producing, and the fruit at eighty is on the same tree as the fruit at thirty.

You are the same tree that walked to work for eleven weeks in the winter, and Psalm 92:14 has never once made those two women different people. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps sap in something old, and the psalm insists on the still rather than on the once.

So the problem is not the stories. The problem is that you have been telling them as though the tree were down.

Tell it with your body in the room

Here is the practical thing and it will sound odd for about a paragraph.

Tell the story standing up, and show them how it went.

You are able to put your body into the telling, and doing that has never once required your body to be able to do the thing again. It is written that they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a woman on her feet in a front room with two children watching.

Not sitting in the chair. Get up. Show them how you held your sister's boy, with your arms, right there. Show them how far it was by pointing at the end of the street. Show them the way you had to lean into the wind on that hill, standing in the front room, leaning.

Because here is what actually happens in a child's head, and it is the opposite of the thing being dreaded.

When you sit and describe it, they hear a past. When you stand up and act it out, badly, with arms that cannot do what they used to, they see a woman doing something right now, and the story is happening in the room.

They are not comparing your arms to the arms in the story. They have never met those arms. They are watching their grandmother stand in the middle of the carpet and show them something, and that is the memory they will keep.

You have grandchildren who will remember you standing up, and what your body can do while you tell it has never once been the thing they are watching. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a woman on her feet the center of a room, and Psalm 92:14 has the old still bringing forth rather than reporting on a harvest that finished.

Finish the story

And here is the second half of the assignment, and it is a discipline.

Finish it. All the way to the end, including the end you have been cutting off.

You are permitted to take the whole three minutes of a story, and finishing it has never once been an imposition on anybody in the room. It is written that they shall be full of sap and flourishing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman telling a long story to people who are not in a hurry.

You have been ending early for three years because you decided somewhere that the second half is where it gets sad. It is not. The second half is where it gets good. The second half is the part where you got there.

And do not say anyway, that was a long time ago. That sentence is you apologizing for the story, and children hear an apology and conclude that something in it was shameful, and they will not ask for it again.

End it where it ends. Then say nothing, and let the pause be there, and let somebody ask a question.

You have a story that has never once needed a disclaimer on the end of it, and the years between then and now have never once made it smaller. Psalm 92:14 says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in a front room where nobody wants to change the subject.