He Carries the Older Version Too

The forms are on the table and the pen is on top of them and he has been looking at them for about twenty minutes without picking either up.

They want him to step off the committee. Nobody has said that. What they have said is that they are restructuring, and that his role is being folded into another one, and that of course they hope he will stay involved, and everyone has been extremely kind, and he is sixty-eight and he can read a room.

He is not bitter. He would like that on the record. The young man taking it on is good and will do it better and he has already told him so and meant it.

What he did not expect was the thought that came in the kitchen afterward while the kettle was going.

It went: that is more or less the last of what I had to give.

And then, riding in behind it, the one that has actually been sitting in him for two or three years and finally got said. It went: He had the good decades. He has got the leftovers now, and He is too decent to say so.

He was thirty-one when it started, properly. He can tell you what he was like at forty. He built things, he carried people, he sat up at night with families in a way that cost him something. And now he sits in a chair in the third row and he cannot feel much of anything and he has a pen on top of some forms.

God claims the decade you think He is enduring

There is a verse in Isaiah where God speaks about old age directly, and I want you to see how He talks about it, because it is not how you have been talking about it.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Count the times He says carry. Three, in one verse, in different words, as though He wanted to be sure it landed.

And notice He is not being asked. Nobody in that passage has begged Him to stay on. He volunteers it, unprompted, and He picks out the exact stretch of a life you have written off and puts His name on it specifically.

You are standing in the one decade God named out loud when He wanted to say what He would carry. That is not me finding a comfortable reading; it is God claiming hoar hairs by name in Isaiah 46:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and sets it beside a man with a pen on top of some forms.

Who was carrying whom

Now here is the part that I think will actually turn this, and it is a question about the good decades.

You think God had the best of you between thirty-one and about fifty-five. Building things. Carrying people. Sitting up with families.

Ask yourself who was holding whom up in those years.

Because if you are honest, and you are an honest man, you did not generate that. You were carried through it. You were being held while you held people, and you knew it at the time on the good nights and forgot it on the others, and the strength you are now mourning was never actually your contribution. It was on loan and it was His the whole time.

You have been grieving the loss of something that was never coming out of you. The written word says He made and He bears and He carries and He delivers, with all four verbs in His column, and the Holy Spirit is the one who was doing the carrying in the years you were sitting up with families.

Which means the arithmetic underneath your kitchen thought does not work. There is no ledger where God banked your useful years and is now drawing down the remainder. He was never receiving from you. That is not how the relationship has ever been arranged, in any decade of it.

And I want to say a hard, plain thing about the forms. Being folded into another role is a fact about a committee. It is not a fact about you and it is certainly not a fact about God, and you have let one document speak about the other two.

You were never valued for your output, and the affection was never in the accounts. Scripture puts God's love before anything a person does and never once ties it to what they can still carry, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been running an audit of a man in the third row.