Still in the Fight at Seventy-One

The rain came in off the ridge at about four and it has not eased, and it is coming off the edge of that porch roof in a sheet you could wash in.

Hattie is under the dry part in the second chair with a mug she is not drinking, and the noise of it is enormous and she likes it.

She is seventy-one. She came to the Lord at seventeen, in a summer she can still describe in detail, and it was real, and fifty-four years have not shaken it and neither has anything that happened in them.

And there is a thing that has been with her since before she was seventeen.

I am not going to say what it is and she has never said what it is, and this article does not guess. She has fought it, honestly, without any theater about it, for fifty-four years.

It has been quiet for long stretches. Years, sometimes. And it comes back, and it has come back this year, at seventy-one, in a way it has not for a long while.

And here is what has been undoing her since about February, and it is not the thing itself.

It is the number.

Fifty-four years. She was seventeen. She is seventy-one. She assumed, without ever putting it into a sentence anybody could have argued with, that this would be finished at some point. That there would be a year when she noticed it had gone.

And it has not gone. And the arithmetic of that has started saying something to her at three in the morning, and what it says is: if fifty-four years did not do it, then perhaps none of it took. Perhaps the summer you were seventeen was a summer, and you have built a life on it, and here is the evidence.

She is not frightened, exactly. She is seventy-one and she is not much given to fright. It is more like a cold suspicion that has been getting in around the edges.

The rain gets heavier, which she would not have thought possible.

And she thinks about her mother, who lived to eighty-nine in this house, and who used to say a short thing under her breath at certain moments. Hattie heard it a thousand times as a girl and never once asked what it was for.

She knows now.

You have that arithmetic. Yours has a different number on it. But you know what the number has started saying to you, and you know it does not say it in the daytime.

He describes them in the present tense as striving

Hebrews 12 is the running chapter and it opens with a crowd of witnesses and a race, and a few verses in there is a line that gets quoted at people badly.

Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.Hebrews 12:4

I want to handle that sentence carefully, because it has been used as a stick and it was not written as one.

The writer has just spent a paragraph on Christ enduring the cross, and the whole logic of the passage is encouragement: keep going, because look at what He endured and He did not stop. It is a bracing word and it is meant to strengthen, and the surrounding verses are about a Father dealing with children He owns.

But leave the bracing for a minute and look at the description in it, because there are two words in that sentence with your name on them tonight.

Striving against sin.

Present tense. Ongoing. The writer describes his readers, in the middle of a letter, as people who are currently in a fight, and he does not treat that as a scandal or as a sign that something failed at the beginning. It is simply what he assumes they are doing, because that is what the people in that race are doing.

You are described in Scripture as somebody currently striving, and it is written as the ordinary condition and not as a report of failure. That is the written word and not my comfort in a rainstorm, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from the running chapter and lays it on a porch under a roof that is overflowing.

Not yet, he says. Which is a phrase about a race that is still on.

The word for how the race is run assumes length

Go back three verses to the opening of the chapter, because that is where the shape of the whole thing is set.

Let us run with patience the race that is set before us.

Patience there is not the word for waiting quietly in a line. It is the word for staying under a load without collapsing: endurance, the capacity to keep going over distance and time.

You cannot run with that kind of patience over a short course. The word assumes length. It is chosen precisely because the thing being described takes years.

And look at what comes immediately before that verse: an entire chapter, the longest in the letter, listing people who kept going and died without receiving what was promised. That is Hebrews 11, and the last thing it says about them is that they died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off.

The list of the faithful in that book is a list of people who were still going when they stopped.

This is yours, and duration is the shape the race was described in, and it is already settled. Hebrews 12 uses a word for endurance that assumes a long road, and the same Spirit who inspired both chapters is the one making it a present fact in a woman in a rocking chair at seventy-one.

Let me guard this the way I would want it guarded at my own age.

I am not telling you the fight is pleasant or that fifty-four years is a small thing to have carried. It is not small, and anybody who tells you it is has not carried anything.

And I am not ranking. This article does not know what yours is and it never will, and nothing in Scripture holds a league table of what people are up against.

And this most of all, because it is the thing the arithmetic has been saying at three in the morning: there is no verse anywhere that reads duration as a verdict. Not one. The length of time a thing has been with you is not a measurement of whether God did anything when you were seventeen.