Eleven Years Of Caring

There is a back step with a chipped corner, and on it, most evenings, a woman sits down for about four minutes.

Not to rest. Four minutes is not rest and she knows it. She sits down there because it is the one place in that house where nobody can see her from a doorway, and because from the step you can hear the tap running upstairs and the telly through the wall, so she can still hear everything, and that is the point of the step. It is not away. It is just far enough.

She has been sitting on it since the spring the diagnosis came, and that was eleven years ago in April.

Eleven years of the same washing. Eleven years of the little plastic box with the days of the week on it, filled every Sunday night at the kitchen table with the radio low. Eleven years of appointments where somebody who has not read the file asks her the same three questions, and she answers them politely, all three, again.

She is not sad. That is what she cannot get anybody to understand.

People keep offering her sympathy and she does not want it, because sympathy is for sad and she is not sad. She is empty. Those are entirely different things and only one of them has a name people recognize. Sad has weather in it. Sad moves. What she has got is flat, and gray, and level, and it has been level for a very long time, and she has stopped expecting it to lift because expecting things is tiring too.

And the part she would only ever say out loud on that step, if she said it at all, is this. Nobody is coming to relieve her. There is no recovery at the end of this. The road does not turn.

That is the sentence.

Now, listen. I think you are the one on that step, and yours might be a hospital chair or a car in a car park with the engine off. And I am not going to ask you for anything at all in the next few minutes, because you have not got it, and I know you have not got it.

You have been asked for more for eleven years. Not by me. Not today.

God does not ask the empty for a contribution

I want to hand you a line, and I want to hand it to you the right way round, because everybody quotes the wrong half of it.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.Isaiah 40:29

Read who that is addressed to.

The faint. Them that have no might.

Not the willing. Not the ones who have dug deep and found a bit more. Not the person who has had a good week and is on the up. The faint, which in that language is the word for somebody who has come to the end and stopped, and them that have no might, which is not a poetic way of saying tired. It means none. Nothing in the tank. Zero.

Now do the arithmetic, because it is upside down from everything you have been taught since you were small.

You have spent eleven years feeling disqualified by your own emptiness. Every time you have got to the end of yourself you have taken it as evidence that you are failing at this, and you have promised yourself you will do it better tomorrow, and tomorrow has come round again and again and again.

But being empty is the qualification.

That verse hands out strength on exactly one condition, and the condition is having none. Which means the very thing you have been ashamed of is the thing that puts you first in the line. You are not at the back of God's queue because you have nothing left. You are the person the sentence was written about.

And I want to be very plain about what I am not saying, because you have heard the other thing so often you may hear it here by reflex. I am not telling you to try harder. I am not telling you to pray more, to get up earlier, to be more grateful, to find the joy in it, or to serve with a better attitude. That is all effort, and effort is exactly what you have run out of, and prescribing more of it to somebody in your condition is not ministry. It is just another weight, handed over by somebody who was not carrying yours.

There is nothing you can do about the fact that you have run out. There is nothing you have to do about it either.

Two plain things before we go on, said because I would say them to your face.

You are allowed to ask for help with the caring, and asking is not abandoning anybody. Ring the district nurse, ring the social worker, ring the person who said tell me if you ever need anything and has never once been taken up on it. That is not weakness and it is not failure, and God has always worked through hands that turned up.

And if the flat gray has gone somewhere darker, if there have been thoughts about not being here, or about everyone managing better without you, do not carry that on the back step on your own. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, ring your local crisis line, and tell one human being tonight. Being here is good, and it is not enough, and you deserve somebody sitting beside you.