A Month Before Anybody Noticed

She left on a Friday and there was a card and a cake and somebody made a short speech that was genuinely warm.

Nine years.

She had known most of those people longer than she has known some of her friends. She had been at two of their weddings. She had covered for a woman there through a very bad year and had never once mentioned it to anybody, before or since.

The first message came thirty one days later and it was about a password.

Not unkindly. It was a perfectly pleasant message, with an apology in it for bothering her, from somebody she liked, and it was about where the file for the quarterly thing was saved.

She answered it in about four minutes and then sat with her phone in her hand for considerably longer than four minutes.

She is forty six.

And what she has been carrying since, and what she has not said to anybody because there is no way to say it that does not sound like fishing, is this: I was a function in that building for nine years and I thought I was in a place with people in it.

She has tested it since. Not deliberately at first, and then, she admits, slightly deliberately. She has not messaged any of them. It is now four months.

Nothing.

Everybody is busy. She knows that. She was busy too and she is aware, uncomfortably, that when a woman left the year before her she did exactly the same thing, which is to say she meant to get in touch and then did not, and there was no malice in it anywhere, and she thought about that woman fondly for years without ever once contacting her.

So there is nobody to be angry with, and that is somehow worse, because anger would at least have somewhere to go.

You know the month. Yours may have been a church or a street or a family. But you know what it is to be absent from a place for a while and to find out what your absence weighed, and to have no one at all to be cross with about it.

He set His own remembering above the strongest thing there is

Let me name the pit before we go to the text, because if this becomes an article about a workplace it will be too small for what actually happened.

The pit is not the password. It is a sentence a woman is carrying about nine years: I was a function and I thought I was in a place with people in it. And the danger in that sentence is not bitterness, because you are not bitter and you have already worked out that you did the same thing to somebody in the year before you left.

The danger is that it becomes general. That is what a sentence like that does if nobody interrupts it. It starts about an office and becomes about her, and then it becomes about how she is held anywhere, by anybody, including by God, and it does all of that without ever being said out loud.

Here is the verse.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.Isaiah 49:15

Notice what God is doing.

He is not making a general remark about His good memory. He takes the strongest bond in the created world, the one everybody would name if you asked for the least forgettable relationship there is, and He says: even that is capable of failing, and I will not.

That is a deliberate measurement. He picked the highest bar that exists and put Himself above it.

Now I want to handle the first clause carefully, because there is a lazy way to read it and this article is not taking it. God is not accusing anybody's mother. He is not inviting you to search your own history for a case. He is using the strongest bond He made, in general, as a measure, and then going past it, and the sentence is about Him.

Here the line goes in the same paragraph, because on this ground the picture never travels without it. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Isaiah 49:15 is a comparison God chose to say something about His own remembering. It does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by a title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays exactly the shape He gave it. Scripture reaches for a father's language for Him constantly and a mother's deliberately, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it is His own.

And He does not leave it as a claim. He says how it is kept.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.Isaiah 49:16

Cut in. On the hands. Not on a list somebody has to maintain, and not somewhere He would need a reason to go and look.

You are remembered by somebody whose memory does not thin out, and you were not forgotten in that month. Isaiah 49:15 says they may forget, yet will I not forget thee, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a woman whose phone stayed quiet for four weeks.

Take that with the phone in your hand, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written. You are not forgotten, and the thirty one days measured a building and not you. Isaiah 49:15 sets His remembering above the highest bar there is, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that below the head into the place where a sentence about an office was quietly becoming a sentence about a life.