Useful All My Life

She has been useful since she was twenty three and there is a good deal of evidence.

Four children of her own and then two of her sister's after the accident. Thirty one years of the same job. A husband who was ill for the last nine years of his life and who was nursed at home because she said he would be. Fourteen years since then of grandchildren dropped off and picked up, and a stretch in the middle of that when she had one of them living with her for two years because the alternative was worse.

She is eighty three.

Nobody has ever had to wonder what she was for. That is meant plainly and not bitterly, and she would say it herself in almost those words.

She was useful. It was the whole architecture of her life and she was good at it and she does not regret one hour of it, and if you sat in that front room and suggested she had been used she would put you right quite firmly and you would deserve it.

But there is a thing she has never said and it came up in her in February when her granddaughter knelt down to put a blanket over her knees.

Nobody has ever just wanted me.

Not one person, in eighty three years, has come toward her for no reason. Everybody who has ever come has come because she was needed, or because she was the one who would do it, or afterward because they were grateful, and gratitude is a lovely thing and it is not the thing.

And she extended it, without ever saying it out loud, in the direction you would expect. She assumes God is the same. Not unkindly. She assumes He has had a great deal of use out of her, which He was entitled to, and that this is what the arrangement is, and she is not complaining about it at eighty three and she is not going to start.

She said one sentence to that granddaughter with the blanket, and it came out flat, the way true things do when they have been down a long way for a long time.

She said: I have been useful all my life.

And the girl said, what does that mean, Nan, and she said nothing, or something about the tea.

You know the sentence. You may be forty years off saying it. But you know what it is to be valued honestly for what you do, by people who love you, and to have no idea at all what you would be to anybody with your hands empty.

Shelter is not employment

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, and let me be careful, because a woman of eighty three has heard a great many people be encouraging at her and she can tell within a sentence whether somebody is talking to her or performing.

The pit is not that the sixty years were wrong. They were not wrong. They are the finest thing about your life and God is not asking for them back or telling you they were a mistake.

The pit is a conclusion you drew from them, quietly, decades ago, which is that shelter is a thing a person is employed into, and that the wages are usefulness, and that when the usefulness stops so does the standing.

Here is the verse.

The Lord recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.Ruth 2:12

Boaz says this in a field to a foreign widow who is gleaning at the edges.

You are under shelter and you were never employed into it. Ruth 2:12 names the work and the wings as two separate things inside one sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who shelters, and He was not counting anybody's hours when He did it.

Now notice, because this is exact. He does mention her work. He is not pretending she has done nothing; he says the Lord recompense thy work, and he means the leaving of her own country and the staying with Naomi, and he is not embarrassed to name it.

And then he says something entirely separate, joined by nothing but a comma of thought: under whose wings thou art come to trust.

The work is one thing. The wings are another. He does not say the Lord will shelter you in return for your work, and he does not present the wings as the wages of anything. He names the work, hands the reward of it over to God, and then describes where she has come, which is under shelter.

Shelter is not employment. That distinction is sitting right there in the sentence and it has been there for three thousand years.

Take that in the chair with the blanket on your knees, and know it is not me being nice to an old woman, it is what is written. The wings are shelter and not wages, and coming to trust under them was never something anybody worked for. Ruth 2:12 keeps the work and the wings apart in one sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who shelters, and He did not hire you at twenty three.

And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. 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. The sheltering wings are one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.