At Her Daughters Baptism

The grass at the edge of the water is trodden flat by now, and it is a bright Sunday afternoon in late June.

Forty or so of them have come down from the parking area with folding chairs and a cooler. Somebody's toddler is being kept away from the bank by an older cousin. There is a stack of white towels on the tailgate of a truck and a woman handing them out, and they have already sung twice, badly and gladly, with no instrument except one guitar that keeps going flat in the heat.

Her daughter is twenty two and standing waist deep in brown river water in an oversized white T shirt, laughing, because the pastor has just told her the bottom is slippery and she has just found out he is right.

The mother is on the bank with the towel over her arm. Hers is the towel. She asked for that job three weeks ago and nobody argued, and she has been holding it since the singing started, folded once over her forearm, the way you hold something you are going to need.

And she is glad. That is the part nobody watching would doubt. She is filming it on her phone with one hand and the frame is shaking because her arm will not stay still, and when they go under and come up she makes a noise she has never made in public in her life.

And underneath the gladness, at the exact same time, the other thing.

Her daughter learned all of this from somebody else. From a grandmother with a station wagon and a standing Wednesday, and a youth pastor's wife who kept a spare toothbrush in a drawer for her. The mother knows the outline of her own daughter's childhood the way you know a house from the sidewalk. She was working doubles, and she was drinking most evenings after, and there were years in there she can name by their hardest month. Fourteen of them, if she counts honestly, and she has counted.

She came to faith at forty six in a chair in a church basement on a Tuesday.

So she stands on the trodden grass holding a towel, forty nine years old, weeping in a way everybody around her reads as joy, and it is joy, and it is also the other thing, and she has no idea how to tell anybody that both are running at once and neither one is fake.

The daughter comes up the bank grinning with her hair flat to her head, and the mother opens the towel and wraps her up in it and says something into her wet hair, and that is the photograph somebody takes.

You know the bank. Yours might be a wedding, or a grandchild's dedication, or a Christmas table where everybody is happy and you are doing arithmetic on the years. And you know how it goes: glad all the way through, and grieving all the way through, and nobody in the frame with any idea that both are true.

He speaks to people who are still mourning

Let me take you to the verse everybody quotes at times like this, and let me read it slower than it usually gets read.

To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD.Isaiah 61:3

Notice who is being spoken to. Them that mourn. Present tense, still mourning, mourning right now as the gift is being handed over. He does not say to those who used to mourn. He does not say to those who have gotten over it. The people receiving the oil of joy in that sentence are people who are, at that moment, in mourning, and God appoints something for them without first requiring them to stop.

You are given the oil of joy while the mourning is still going on, and you were never asked to finish grieving before you were allowed to be glad. That is the plain wording of Isaiah 61:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old promise about ashes and lays it on a river bank in June, which is what He has always done with the word.

And look at what is actually exchanged. Beauty for ashes. Oil for mourning. A garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness. Every one of those is something put on a person now, today, in the body they are standing in. Not one of them is a refund. He does not say the fire never happened. There are still ashes in the sentence, and He is not pretending otherwise.

The men hired at the eleventh hour

There is a story Jesus told that this church world does not tell often enough, and it is the most direct thing in the Gospels about coming late.

A householder hires laborers at daybreak. He goes out again at nine, and at noon, and at three, and then at five in the afternoon, an hour before the day ends, and finds men still standing there because nobody hired them. He sends them in too. And at the end of the day he pays the last ones first and gives them a full day's wage.

I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?Matthew 20:14-15

Even as unto thee. The same coin, in the same hand, at the same counter. The men who worked one hour got what the men who worked twelve got, and the ones who had worked all day were furious about it, which tells you the arithmetic in your chest is at least an ancient arithmetic.

You have the same coin the early ones have, and it is already yours by the householder's own decision. Matthew 20:14 has him saying it out loud, and it is the Spirit, not the number of hours anybody worked, who makes that verse land in a woman of forty nine holding a wet towel.

And notice what those men did not get. He did not give them back the hours in the marketplace. He did not say the standing around never happened, or that it was secretly productive, or that their one hour would be worth more than everybody else's twelve. He gave them the wage. That was all, and it was everything, and it was the same as the wage of the man who started at dawn.

What He never offered anybody

I want to be careful with you here, because this is where a lot of well meaning people hand out a promise God did not make.

Nobody in Scripture gets their years back. Not one person. The thief on the cross had hours left and Jesus said today shalt thou be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43), and He did not add a word about the wasted life behind him being made up somehow. Peter was restored on a beach over breakfast and the three denials stayed exactly where they were in the record. What is offered, every single time, is presence and possession from here, and never a rewind.

You have Him now and you were never promised the past back, and what you do have is already His and already given. It is written that He gives, in the present tense, in Isaiah 61, and the Spirit who applies that verse is not in the business of pretending a decade did not cost what it cost.

Which means, and I say this gently, that the grief on that river bank is not a failure of faith and it is not something to repent of. It is accurate. Those years happened. A woman who can name fourteen of them by their hardest month is not being ungrateful, she is being truthful, and the God who put a whole book of Lamentations in the Bible is not startled by an accurate feeling at a baptism.

You are allowed both things at once, and it is already settled that He receives both. Scripture holds joy and grief in the same breath constantly, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person weep two ways at the same time without either one being false.