Why Did It Land On Me

Quarter past ten, and the house has finally gone quiet.

She ties the bag and holds the back door with her foot so it does not bang, because the bang goes up through the ceiling and into her mother's room, and her mother has only just settled.

Down the side path in slippers. Lid up. Bag in. Lid down slow, with a hand on it.

Then she stands there, because this is it. This is the bit of the day that belongs to her.

The job went the week the hospital said her mother could come home if somebody was there all the time. She was the somebody. Nobody sat down and decided it, it simply turned out that she was the one who could, so she was the one who did, and the wage stopped and has not started again.

Her brother rings on a Sunday and tells her she is a saint, and he means it kindly, and then he goes back to his life. Her cousin puts photographs up from somewhere hot. The two of them at a table with the sea behind, laughing.

And out here on the path, in the dark, with her hand still on the lid, the sentence arrives whole, the way it always does. They have never once had to choose. And they are not better people than me.

She does not say it in the house. In the house she says up we come, and there we are, and I will do it, and she says all of them warmly, because she loves her mother and she would do it again.

She just cannot say the other thing anywhere at all.

You have a path of your own like that one, or you would not have opened this.

Nobody is in trouble for asking

Let me start where the worry actually sits, because it is not the question itself. It is what a person is afraid the question will cost her.

She is afraid that if she says it out loud, straight up, in the words she would really use, something will go out of the relationship. That He will hear the tone. That a woman who has been kept going by Him through years of this will have spent, in one sentence on a dark path, the good standing she has with Him.

Hear me plainly, because I am not in the business of dressing things up. You are not in trouble for the question. Not this one, and not in the words you would use if you were sure that nobody could hear.

That is not me being kind to you. It is me reading you what is written. Jeremiah opens his mouth and says Righteous are You, O Lord, when I complain to You: yet I would plead my case before You. Why does the way of the wicked prosper? (Jeremiah 12:1). That is a prophet saying God is right and asking why the arrangement is unfair, in one breath, on one page. The Holy Spirit is the one who kept that in the book. Nobody tidied it out in any century since, and the reason it is still sitting there is that somebody standing exactly where you are standing was going to need to see it.

So the asking is not the disloyalty. Now watch what happens to a question that never gets asked.

What a swallowed question turns into

A question asked is a question. A question swallowed becomes a case.

That is the whole mechanism, and it works slowly, which is why nobody catches it happening. The first time, it is a thing you wonder on a dark path. The fortieth time, it is not a wonder any more. It has stopped being addressed to anybody at all. It has quietly become a finding about God that gets carried around: He is fair with them, and He is something else with me.

Nobody decides that. It settles, the way silt settles in still water, and it settles quietest in the people who are far too loyal to say anything.

You have the standing to bring it to Him instead, and that standing is not something earned this week by coping well. Scripture says pour out your heart before him (Psalm 62:8), which is not a delicate instruction and was never meant to be, and the same Spirit who taught you to call Him Father carries the ugly half of a sentence up as readily as the tidy half.

What He gives somebody else is not taken off your plate

Now the arithmetic itself, and I am not going to talk you out of it, because as arithmetic it is correct. Your cousin has not done this. Your brother has not done this. They are not better people than you and nobody in this house is pretending they are.

I also do not have a reason for you. I have read the reasons that get handed out at moments like this and I would not put one of them in your hand. They are cheap, and they ask a person to be satisfied with an explanation instead of with God.

What I do have is one thing that is written, and it is worth considerably more than a reason.

Jesus told a story about a man hiring for his vineyard: workers taken on at first light, more at the middle of the day, and the last of them so late in the afternoon that the light was nearly gone (Matthew 20:1 to 15). At the end of it, the ones who came last were paid for a full day. And here is the part that matters to a woman standing on a path at night. The ones who started at first light were not paid less. Nothing was taken off them. Not an hour of it, not a crumb.

The ache in that story is not shortage. It is watching. And nothing in the master's answer says the early ones had been short-changed, because they had not been.

You have not been handed a smaller share of God so that somebody easier off could be handed a bigger one. That is not how He holds anything. He is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), the written word puts it that plainly, and His Spirit in you is not a lesser Spirit than the one in a person whose life came together without a fight. What you have of Him is whole.

I am telling you what He is like. I am not telling you what He is about to do about your situation, because I do not know that, and neither does anybody who says they do.