Everybody On The List But Her

The list lives on the back of the kitchen door and it is in her handwriting.

His tablets and the hour he takes them, and which of the two he forgets. Her mother's appointment in the spring and the other one in the fall. The number for the surgery, though she has known it by heart for eleven years. Which grandchild cannot swallow the big ones. The date the prescription runs out, written small in the corner, three weeks ahead of the date it actually runs out, because she learned that lesson once.

Forty years of that door.

She was standing in front of it on a Tuesday with a pen in her hand, adding something, and her daughter came through and said, Mama, when was your last one.

And she said, oh, I am fine.

She said it fast. She heard herself say it fast.

Her daughter did not push it. She picked up the basket and went on out to the yard, and the screen door did its noise, and the woman stood there with the kitchen door open in her hand, reading her own writing.

Her name is not on it anywhere.

Not once, in forty years, in any handwriting, including her own. She checked. She stood there and actually checked, top to bottom, in case there was something she had forgotten about herself.

Here is what she has never said out loud, and it is not self pity, it is closer to surprise.

It had genuinely never occurred to her that she was a person with a body in this house.

She knows every dose under this roof. She could tell you the sleeping habits of five people. And she could not tell you the last time somebody wrote her name on a piece of paper next to a time of day.

If you keep everybody else's list, come and sit at the table a minute. Somebody else is stirring that pot.

What heaven did first for a worn out man

There is a scene with a prophet who has just done the biggest thing he will ever do, and has run for his life, and is lying under a tree asking to die.

And heaven does not send him a word.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.1 Kings 19:5

Bread and water. Then he lies down and sleeps again, and the angel comes a second time and does exactly the same thing.

No correction. No sermon. No question about why a man of his history is under a tree in that condition. Two meals and two sleeps, and only after that does anything else happen.

You are being tended in the same order heaven used on Elijah, and it started with a body rather than with a word. 1 Kings 19:5 has an angel touching a worn out man and telling him to eat before anything at all is said about his calling, and the Holy Spirit kept that order in the record instead of tidying it into something more spiritual, which means what your body needs this week is not the shallow end of the help on offer.

The list was never a moral achievement

Let us be plain and gentle about the forty years, because there is nothing here to be ashamed of and something to be looked at.

Keeping that door is love. It is not martyrdom and it is not a symptom. Five people have been carried through decades because one woman kept a list, and heaven has that written down somewhere in better handwriting than yours.

What happened is smaller than a failure. A list got made, over years, by the person who was doing the making, and the person doing the making was never in the room to be added.

You have a body that belongs in the same category as the ones you have been tending, and it was never a lower category. 1 Corinthians 6:19 says your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, and it is written to ordinary believers about their own frames rather than about the people in their care, and the same Spirit named in that verse indwells the woman keeping the door as surely as anybody written on it.

Nothing here is a program

Let us be careful, because this is exactly where an article can turn into another list, and this one is not going to do that to you.

There is no diet in this. No regime, no supplement, no schedule, no view about anything a doctor has told you. If you are under a doctor, stay under your doctor, and let nothing here get between you and them. And nothing in this says that a body which is struggling has been neglected by the woman living in it. Bodies do what they do for reasons nobody chose. That is not a mark against anyone.

You are not being handed a standard, and nothing your body is doing has ever been read as a verdict on you. John 9:3 has the question of whose fault it was refused outright before it could take root, and it is written down so nobody would have to carry that question around, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Comforter rather than the inspector.