I Used To Run With Them

You are the one at the door now.

They go out together, the three of them, and there is a moment at the gate where somebody looks back and you lift your hand, and then they are gone up the road and you go back in.

You did that for two years before you noticed what it was.

Because there was a stretch of about six years where you went with them. You were the one who suggested it. You were faster than two of them and you knew every route, and there is a photograph somewhere of the four of you at the top of a hill that you cannot look at for very long.

And then something in your body changed. Not dramatically and not all at once. It got harder, and then it got embarrassing, and then on some afternoon you said go on without me, and that sentence turned out to be permanent, and nobody in the family remembers the day it happened except you.

You have never mentioned it. What would you even say. They are not doing anything wrong. They go, they come back, they are pleased to see you.

And you stand in a doorway, twice a week, and lift your hand.

I am not going to tell you that you can catch them up. You cannot, and a stranger promising you that would be insulting.

I am going to tell you that being at the door is not the only alternative to being at the front, and that there is a third position which nobody described to you.

He knoweth our frame

There is a line in the psalms that people quote to comfort somebody, and read carefully it is a statement about how God assesses a body.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. (Psalm 103:14, King James Version)

For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.

He knows the frame. Not the potential of the frame, and not the frame at its best in 2009. The frame, as it is, today.

You have a God who is working from an accurate picture of what your body is now, and Psalm 103:14 has never once assessed a person against a frame they used to have. The verse says He remembers that we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows exactly what a body can do this morning without needing to be told.

You are able to feel how unusual that is, because you have spent two years being assessed by yourself against a version of you that existed once.

And notice the tone of the verse. There is no disappointment in it. It sits inside a passage about mercy and compassion, and the fact of the dust is given as the reason for the tenderness rather than as a complaint about the material.

Your children have never once been disappointed in your frame. You have.

You are the only person in this household running that comparison, and the written word has never once joined you in it. The Spirit of God is the one who deals gently with dust on purpose, and Psalm 103:14 makes the knowing of the frame the ground of the compassion rather than a limit on it.

Which means the problem in front of us is not the frame. It is the arrangement, and arrangements can be changed by one person in an afternoon.

The third position

Here is the thing nobody told you.

You have been choosing between the front and the door, and there is a third place.

You have options that were never presented to you, and being unable to keep up has never once left only one alternative. It is written that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman a position in her own family that she could not see.

The third position is the end. You go to where they finish.

If they go up the road and come back the same way, then the corner they come back round is where you stand, and the last five minutes home belongs to you and whoever arrives first.

Not at the door. In it. Moving, outside, alongside them, and not one part of that required keeping pace with a nineteen year old.

You are able to put your body in the same activity at a different point in it, and being at a different speed has never once put anybody outside a family. The Spirit of God is the one who gathers people who are moving at four speeds into one thing, and Psalm 103:14 says He knows the frame of each one of them.

And there is a second benefit that will surprise you, and it is the real reason I want you to do this.

The last five minutes is when people talk. The first five nobody says anything, because everybody is settling. The middle is effort. The last part on the way home is when a seventeen year old says something they were not planning to say, and for two years that has happened while one person in this family was indoors.

Go to the corner tonight

So here is the assignment.

When they go out tonight, wait, and then walk to the corner where they finish.

You are permitted to insert yourself into the end of something you cannot do the whole of, and doing that has never once been a consolation prize. It is written that He remembers we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is the one who goes with a woman down her own street to stand at a corner.

Do not tell them you are coming. That makes it a thing, and a thing invites a reaction, and one of them will say something kind that will make you want to cry.

Just go. Be there. Fall in beside whoever comes round first, and walk home.

If the geography is wrong, adjust it. If they run a loop, go halfway round it backwards and meet them in the middle. If they go out in a car to somewhere, walk to the driveway and be outside when they come back and go round the block with them once before anybody goes in.

You have a body that can do the last part of it, and the last part has never once been the leftovers of the thing. Psalm 103:14 has God knowing the frame and remembering the dust, and the Spirit of God is the one standing on a corner with a woman at half past six.

Do it twice this week without commenting on it, and see what one of them says on the way home.