Thirty Years and Eighteen Months

Her mother did it for thirty years and never once made a thing of it.

Every Wednesday, a hot meal, in the hall, for whoever came. It started because a woman in that valley had nobody, and by the second year there were eleven of them, and by the tenth there was a rota and a proper urn and a man who came at half eight to put the tables out.

Thirty years. Through two hip operations, a bad stretch when her husband was ill, and the winter the boiler went and they cooked at home and carried it down in the back of a car.

She died in the February, and by the March, Delia had taken it on.

Of course she had. Everybody assumed it, and Delia assumed it too, and there was no conversation about it at all. She had helped since she was a girl. She knew where the tin opener lived.

She lasted eighteen months.

Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody fell out. She simply got tired in a way she could not describe to anybody, and then she got tired of being tired, and then there was a Wednesday in the autumn when she stood in her own kitchen at ten past seven in the morning and could not make herself go, and she rang Marion and said she thought somebody else should take it on now.

Marion was lovely about it. Everybody was lovely about it. That is almost the worst part.

That was four years ago, and Delia has not been in that hall on a Wednesday since. She goes on Sundays and she sits at the back and she leaves promptly, and if the meal comes up in conversation she has a way of turning her head slightly that her family have all learned to work around.

She is not proud. She is not sulking. She has simply arrived at a settled conclusion about herself, and the conclusion is a sum: thirty years, and eighteen months.

She has never once said that sum out loud. It just sits there, doing arithmetic in the background of everything.

And you may have your own sum. Somebody in your line did a thing for decades and you could not, and the number has become a description of your character rather than a fact about two different lives.

God is not unjust, and He does not forget the shorter list

Take this off first, my love, because you have carried it for four years and it was never yours to carry.

You are not the failed version of your mother. You never were. Scripture says plainly that God is not unjust and does not forget work done for Him, and it says nothing at all about grading it against somebody else's, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your stamina against hers, who sustains any work that lasts. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy and it has kept you out of a hall for four years.

Now hear the sentence, and hear how carefully His Spirit worded it.

God is not unjust; He will not forget your work and the love you have shown Him as you have helped His people and continue to help them.Hebrews 6:10

He will not forget your work.

Your work. Not the longest work in the building. Not the work of the person who did it before you. Yours, at the size it actually was.

And look at the reason given: because He is not unjust. Which means that to forget it would be an injustice, and He does not do those. The remembering is not sentimental. It is a matter of His character.

Eighteen months of Wednesdays is work. It is written into the record and His Spirit is the one who held you through every one of those seventy or so mornings, and the fact that it stopped has never once erased what happened while it ran.

Now here is the part I want to say carefully, because it is where the ache actually lives.

There were people once who stayed at one long work for forty years, and we tell that story as though the same forty people were there the whole time. They were not. People came in and did nine years and went. People did eighteen months and were never heard of again. There were men whose entire contribution was one piece of work in one particular year, and without it the rest would have stalled.

The long work is carried by a great many short ones. It always has been.

You have been measuring a relay leg against a whole race. Scripture says God is not unjust and will not forget your work, and the same Spirit who was in that hall for your mother's thirty years was in it for your eighteen months, and He is not comparing the two.

And I will say the tender part plainly, because you would say it to me over a pot of tea. Your mother did not have your eighteen months. She had different ones. She was thirty-one when she started and had a village around her and a husband who put the tables out. You started in the March after your own mother died, in grief nobody had named, in a body four years older than hers was, and you did seventy Wednesdays inside that.

That is not a shorter version of her thirty years. That is a different and quite heavy thing, done well, in the dark.