The Newest Person in the Room

The book in her lap is three weeks old and it still smells of glue.

She bought it at a store in the strip mall by the tire place, and she chose the burgundy one because the black one looked like it belonged to somebody who already knew things. There is a gold sticker on the back that says Gift Edition. The ribbon is still lying flat where the factory folded it, at the front, at the beginning of Genesis, and the spine is stiff enough that the pages want to shut when she lets go.

Six thirty on a Tuesday, in a side room with a card table and a plate of store cookies nobody has started. Nine chairs. Her name tag has her full name on it because she wrote it out properly, and everybody else has a first name in marker.

She is sixty three. The next oldest person in the circle is maybe thirty eight.

The leader says a reference and the room does a thing she was not ready for. The young woman across from her, twenty six at the outside, says the whole passage from memory without opening anything, quietly, like a phone number. The guy in the hoodie flips straight to it. No contents page, no thumbing. He goes there the way you reach for a light switch in your own hallway.

She finds the contents page and runs her finger down it. Her reading glasses are in her purse on the floor and she is not going to bend down for them in the middle of this.

The woman beside her notices and, kindly, without a word, tilts her own book so she can see. It is a lovely thing to do and it is the worst moment of the evening.

Because here is what goes through her while she reads off somebody else's page. These people have had this their whole lives. She was learning it at nine. He grew up with it on the fridge. And underneath that, the arithmetic she cannot stop doing: forty years she had it available and did not have it, and there is no version of tonight where she gets any of them back.

The cookies stay on the plate. Somebody prays. She holds a book that has not been opened enough to stay open.

You know the room. Yours might be a small group, or a class, or a table of people who all know where everything is. And you know the arithmetic, and how it runs underneath every kind thing anybody does for you in there.

There is a psalm for this, written by somebody old

There is a psalm in there nobody puts on a coffee mug, written by a man who has gotten old and says so out loud.

Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.Psalm 71:18

Read what he actually wants. Not more years. Not a compensation package. He wants to show God's strength to the generation coming up behind him, and he asks for enough time to do it. That is the whole request.

And look where he is sitting when he prays it. Old. Grayheaded. Saying both words about himself in public, in a song other people would sing. He is not pretending to be thirty, and he is not apologizing either.

You are the person that psalm was put in the book for, and you were on its mind long before you walked into a side room with a name tag on. Psalm 71:18 is written down and kept for exactly this chair, and the Spirit who inspired an old man's request is the one who has just handed it to a woman holding a book that still smells of glue.

And notice what does not happen next in that psalm. No guarantee is printed underneath it. God does not answer in verse nineteen with a schedule or a yield. The psalmist asks, plainly, out loud, and then keeps singing. That is the honest shape of it and I am not going to improve on it for you tonight.

You have a request you are allowed to make out loud, and it is already yours to pray because Scripture put the words in your hands. His word gave an old man a sentence and then let it stand without a promise stapled to it, and it is the Spirit, not the certainty of an outcome, who makes a prayer like that worth praying in a folding chair.

What a quoted verse is and is not

A word about the young woman who recited the whole passage without opening anything, because that landed in your chest as a verdict and it was not one.

That is fluency, and fluency is what repetition does to a person. She heard those words at nine, on a fridge, in a car, in a room with a felt board, four hundred times before she knew what they meant. It is a gift, and it is the same mechanism that lets anybody sing along to a song from childhood without ever deciding to learn it.

I work in music and I meet this constantly. Some people read a chart at sight and some cannot, and the second group includes the finest musicians I know. Sight reading is a skill with a history behind it. It is not a measure of the ear.

You are not behind anybody in that circle, and you were never entered into a competition that room is not running. Scripture does not rank the fluent above the new, and it is the same Spirit teaching the twenty six year old and the sixty three year old, in the same room, on the same Tuesday.

And nobody in there thinks it either. The woman who tilted her book over was not being generous to somebody who did not belong. She was doing the ordinary thing anybody does for the person next to them, and the reason it landed like a judgment is that the judgment came in already, in a purse, along with the reading glasses.

You are welcome in a chair you have only sat in once, and you have that on better authority than the room's good manners. It is written that the Lord looks on the heart rather than the outward appearance, and it is His Spirit, not a familiarity with where Habakkuk is, who makes a person at home in a room like that.

The forty years

Now the arithmetic, and I am not going to talk you out of it.

Forty years is forty years. It is not nothing and it is not secretly fine, and I am not going to tell you God was quietly running them for you the whole time so that nothing was lost. You know what you know about those years. Some of it is loss and it is allowed to be loss, and somebody who has just started is entitled to grieve it without being handed a tidy sentence about it.

There is a moment in one of Jesus's stories that has always steadied me here. Men are standing in a marketplace at the eleventh hour, almost the end of the day, and the owner of the vineyard asks why they are standing there. Their answer is completely plain: because nobody hired us.

Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us.Matthew 20:6-7

He does not argue with the answer or ask what they had been doing since dawn. He sends them into the vineyard, and at the end they are paid the same as the men who started at dawn, and when the early crowd complains he tells them the arrangement was never about hours.

You are hired at the hour you were actually asked, and it is already settled that the wage was never calculated off the clock. Matthew 20 says the last received the same, and it is the Spirit who takes a story about a vineyard and lays it over a woman's forty years without pretending they were something other than what they were.

That is not the same as saying the forty years were fine. It is saying they are not what the wage is counted on. And it is no promise that the years ahead will be unusually productive to make up the difference, because Jesus does not say that and I will not say it for Him. What He says is that the eleventh hour men went in and were dealt with generously, and that is enough to be going on with.

Here is what I will not do. I will not resolve this chord for you tonight. Some things stay unresolved for a long while and that is not the same as being broken.