I Always Give Something Back

Her neighbor left soup on the step in February and there was a card back through the door within the hour.

That is not remarkable. That is a well brought up woman doing a normal thing, and if that were the whole of it there would be no article.

Here is the whole of it.

Her friend paid for the coffee in March and she bought the next two. A woman at church gave her a lift twice and she found out about her birthday and got something. Her son in law fixed the gutter and there is a bottle in the cupboard she has not yet found the right moment to hand over, and she thinks about it about once a week.

She has never in her life been given a thing and left it lying there.

She is fifty eight. She would tell you she is not keeping score and she means it, and it is true, because a score would require a ledger and there is no ledger. It is faster than a ledger. Something arrives and something goes back, almost in the same motion, the way you catch a ball and throw it.

And in March she found out what it costs.

She had a fall. Nothing broken, but she was on the sofa for eleven days and could not do anything for anybody, and people came. And the eleven days were, by a distance, the worst eleven days of her adult life, and not because of the hip.

She could not send anything back.

She lay there while a woman she barely knows changed her bed, and there was nothing in her that could bear it, and she cried about it once, alone, at about four in the afternoon, and told nobody.

You know the motion. Yours may be smaller. But you know what it is to have something arrive and go straight back out, and to have done it so long and so smoothly that you have never once found out what it would feel like to keep one.

There is nothing in the verse to return

Let me name the pit before we go to the text, because if this is heard as a criticism of good manners it will be dismissed within a paragraph, and rightly.

The pit is not politeness. Everything you have ever sent back was genuinely meant, and the card through the door in February made your neighbor's week, and none of that is being taken away. The pit is that the returning happens before the receiving does, so nothing has ever been in you long enough to do what it came to do. It arrives, it is answered, it goes. The soup never got as far as your chest.

So here is a sentence you cannot answer.

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13

Look for what could possibly go back.

There is one who comforts, and one who is comforted. There is no exchange in it. There is nothing offered in return, nothing suggested, nothing implied. It is not a transaction that has been generously waived; it is not a transaction at all, and there is no shape in the sentence for a return to be made in.

And notice who chose the picture. God did, about Himself, in the first person, in His own words.

Here I draw the line 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 66:13 is a simile God selected to say what His comfort is like. It does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by a title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays in the form He gave it. Scripture uses 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.

You are not in debt for what has been given you, and you were never invoiced for it. Isaiah 66:13 puts the comforting entirely on His side and asks nothing back, and it is the Holy Spirit who comforts, and there is no return leg in that sentence.

Take that on the sofa or on the path, and know it is not my kindness, it is His own sentence. You are being comforted and there is nothing at all to send back. Isaiah 66:13 has no return in it anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, and He has never once been waiting at the door for a card.