She can bring a room down with her voice in about ninety seconds and she has done it in some very bad hours.
The night of the accident, when four hundred people were in that building and nobody knew what to do with any of it, she was the one who stood up and spoke, and people who were there still talk about it, and what they remember is not what she said. They remember that the room stopped shaking.
She has sat with three women through the worst weeks of their lives this year alone. She is the one the hospital chaplain rings. She knows how to be in a room where something terrible has happened and not fill it up with herself, which is a rarer thing than people realize.
Her father died on the second of February.
And here is what has happened since, and she has not said one word of it out loud.
Nothing. Not from unkindness; the opposite. People were lovely at the funeral. There were cards, and there was a woman who came and did her ironing for a fortnight without being asked, and there were messages she still has.
But comfort, the actual thing, the thing she carries into other people's rooms, has not once come into hers.
Partly because she does not know how to be in the chair. She has been in the other chair for twenty years. When somebody starts, she can feel herself begin to manage the conversation, and she is so good at it that they never notice they have stopped being the comforter and become the comforted, and she has done that in every single conversation since February without once deciding to.
And partly because nobody thinks to. That is not their fault. It is very hard to imagine bringing a cup of tea to the person who taught you what a cup of tea is for.
She is forty seven. She was at the front on Sunday and she was good.
You know that chair. Yours may be a smaller room. But you know what it is to be superb at carrying something you have not received in years, and to have nobody at all in your life who knows how to hand it to you.
The verse has no delivery role in it
Let me name the pit before we go to the text, because if this becomes an instruction to ask for help it will fail, and you would be too polite to say so.
You are on the receiving end of that sentence, and you were the one it was addressed to all along. Isaiah 66:13 says so will I comfort you, spoken to a person and not to a hall, and it is the Holy Spirit who comforts.
The pit is that you have no muscle for the other chair. Not no willingness. No muscle. Twenty years of carrying has built one set of reflexes so strongly that the opposite motion has atrophied, and now, in the one year you need it, your own competence closes the door before anybody gets a hand on it, and it does so faster than you can notice.
So here is a sentence in which you have no job.
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13
Read the roles in it.
There is one who comforts, and there is one who is comforted, and the one being comforted is doing nothing whatever. Not receiving well. Not responding. Not making it easy for the comforter. Not managing the conversation.
And look at who chose the picture. God did, about Himself, in the first person. Nobody suggested it to Him.
Here the line has to be drawn in the same paragraph, because on this ground the picture never travels alone. 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 chose 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.
You are on the receiving end of that sentence, and you were the one it was addressed to. Isaiah 66:13 says so will I comfort you, spoken to a person and not to a room, and it is the Holy Spirit who comforts, and there is nothing in it for you to lead.
Take that where you are sitting, and know it is not my sympathy, it is His own sentence. You are on the receiving end of this, and there is no delivery role for you in the verse. Isaiah 66:13 puts the whole of the doing on God's side, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, and He does not require you to be good at being comforted first.
You do not have to find somebody who is good enough at this to get past you. That is the thing to put down first, because it is the reason nothing has happened since February.
You are able to be comforted, and you were never the only one in the room who was not allowed to be. Isaiah 66:13 says so will I comfort you, spoken to a person and not to a room of four hundred, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a woman who has been the one settling everybody else since her father died.
You have been waiting, without knowing it, for a person with a skill equal to yours. There are not many, and they are not in your church, and the ones who are do not know they are allowed.
So go to the chair where the other party is God, who does not have to get past you, and who is not deterred by competence, and who chose the picture Himself.
Sit down somewhere nobody can see you. That matters. Not in the building, and not anywhere that has a role in it for you. The car, a bedroom, a bench in a park.
Read the verse with your own name in it.
You are being comforted right now, in the state you are actually in, and He is not waiting for you to be better at receiving. That is Isaiah 66:13 with the doing entirely on His side, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets past a set of reflexes twenty years deep, which no friend of yours has managed since the second of February.
And then, and this is the harder second half, let it be a minute long. Do not summarize it. Do not turn it into something you will say from the front, and if it starts becoming that, and it will, stop and sit still again.
I want to say one more thing about the people around you, because it would be easy for this article to leave you resentful and that would be a poor use of it. Nobody has withheld anything from you. The woman who did your ironing for a fortnight was doing exactly what she knew how to do, and she was right, and it was love. They are not failing you. They simply have not been shown how, and that is partly the price of twenty years of you being magnificent at this.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud where nobody can see you. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over twenty years of reflexes is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your being able to stop managing a conversation, which you cannot by trying. These stand on what is written in Isaiah and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your receiving well. When the comfort lands, and how, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Role I have held since the funeral, you are not the whole of me and you do not get to run every conversation, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Isaiah 66:13 says God comforts as a mother comforts, and the one being comforted in that verse has nothing to do at all.
- Idea that somebody would have to be as good at this as I am before I could be reached, you have no place in this chair. It is written that He chose the comparison Himself and that He is neither male nor female, and His Spirit is the one who gets past a reflex, which no friend of mine has managed since February.
- Lord, You comfort me the way a mother comforts, and You said it about Yourself. I sit where nobody can see me and read it out loud with my own name in it, and I stay still for a minute, and I am not turning any of this into something to say from the front.
Isaiah 66:13
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