Fifty Nine Years With The Same Hymn Book

The hymn book has a rubber band around it, because the spine let go two summers ago and Della never got around to gluing it.

She sits on the second porch step most evenings in July, after the dishes are done, when the light comes in low and yellow across the Hollands' mown field and the swifts start working the air over the barn roof. The step holds the whole day's heat. She sets the hymn book down beside her the way another woman would set down a cup, without looking at it.

She was fourteen when it was put in her hands. Tent meeting, the third night, a folding table of them by the door, and a man in shirtsleeves who gave her one and said, "Now you go be a light, honey."

She has never forgotten the words. She has carried them fifty nine years the way you carry a stone in a coat pocket, forgetting it is there until you reach in for something else.

Fifty nine years. She raised four of her own and half of somebody else's. She took in her mother, then her husband's mother, in the same back bedroom, seven years apart. She has sat at the same end of the same pew since she was a bride and has cooked for more funerals than she can name. When the Sizemore boy came home from the service and would not speak to anybody, he sat at her table on Thursdays for a year and ate and said nothing, and she let him.

And not one evening in fifty nine years has she felt like a light.

That is the thing she has never said out loud. She nearly said it once to Roy Sizemore, that boy's father, who cuts through the side yard on his way to the mailboxes and stops to talk about rain. He said something kind about her being a blessing to this road, and she felt her mouth open, and then she said the rain had been a mercy, and he agreed, and he went on to the mailboxes.

She thinks the sentence must have been meant for somebody with more to it. Somebody who went somewhere. She has been on this road her whole life. She has a hymn book with a rubber band around it and a knee that will not take the third step anymore.

Out on the pole at the corner of the yard, the light comes on. It always does, right about now, when the field goes gray at the edges. It runs off a little eye on the side of the fixture that reads the sky.

Nobody thanked it. Nobody ever has. It did not decide.

The sentence was never a chore list

Everything hangs on what kind of sentence it is, and a whole life can be spent hearing it as the wrong kind.

Paul is writing to people in Thessalonica who are frightened about their dead and confused about the timing of everything, and in the middle of steadying them he says a thing about them that has nothing to do with their performance.

Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness.1 Thessalonians 5:5

Read it slowly. There is no verb in it for anybody to perform. He does not say become the children of light. He does not say try harder to be of the day. He says are, and he says it about all of them, including the ones who were getting it wrong that week, and there were several.

It is the same kind of sentence as she is his mother. It reports a relation. It tells you what family you are in, and family is not a standard you meet, it is a house you were brought into.

You are a child of the day, and that was settled about you before anybody ever handed you a book and a job to go with it. That is not my kindness talking. It is written in 1 Thessalonians 5:5 in the plain present tense, and the Holy Spirit is quite willing to say a written line like that over a woman on a porch step who has heard it read a thousand times and never once heard it about herself.

And notice who Paul is not comparing them to. There is no chart in the passage. Nobody in Thessalonica is told they are a dimmer child of the day than the family across the street. The word day does not come in degrees.

Children of the day is a family word

There is a difference between being told what you are and being told what to produce, and almost everything that has worn you out came in the second shape wearing the clothes of the first.

Think about what a child of the day actually means in that letter. It means you belong to the daylight. It means the dark is not your country and it does not get to claim you as one of its own. That is a statement about where a person is from.

Nobody sat Della down at fourteen and told her she had been moved into the daylight. She got a book and an instruction. The book was a good book. The instruction was meant kindly. But the instruction went in like a splinter and stayed fifty nine years, and the fact never got said at all.

You have been standing in the daylight this whole time, through every one of the years you have been keeping score on. Scripture put that beyond argument when it called us children of the day, and what the Spirit adds is that it is about you, personally, this evening, in whatever chair you are sitting in.

So look at what those fifty nine years actually were.

A back bedroom given up twice. A boy who could not talk fed at a table on Thursdays until he could. A pew held down through four pastors. That was not a woman failing to be a light. That was daylight going where she went, which is what daylight does, and none of it required her to feel anything in particular while it happened.

You were never generating this, and that is the best news on the porch tonight. The written word hands the lighting to God from the first morning of the world to this one, and His Spirit is the one keeping the supply on while you sleep, which is why the years you cannot account for are not gaps.