Everyone Else's Second

There were five of you at the same table at Hannah's wedding, and you have all stayed in touch, and that is the good thing about it and it is also the thing.

Four of them are on their second now. Two of them have the second and are done. One is due in the spring. One announced hers in March in the way people announce a second, which is more casual, because the first announcement is the event and the second one is news.

You have a spare room with a chair in it.

You are genuinely fond of every one of them. That has to be said, because the arithmetic makes it sound otherwise and it is not otherwise. You went to all of it. You held all of them. You are the one who remembers which of the children will not eat anything orange.

But there is a sum that has started following you around, and it appeared without being invited, and it goes: four out of five, twice each, and me, none.

It was at the park on Saturday. Two prams by the gate and everybody talking about sleep, and you stood there being perfectly pleasant, running numbers in the back of your head like a machine you cannot switch off.

The psalm is about being known, not counted

There is an opening in Psalm 139 that has no arithmetic in it anywhere.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:1-3

Look at the verbs. Searched. Known. Understandest. Compassest. Acquainted.

Not one of them is a measurement. There is nothing here about where a person sits relative to anybody else, and no comparison appears in the psalm at any point.

Acquainted with all my ways is the strangest of them, because acquainted is a word for people rather than for data. It is the language of somebody who knows how you take your tea, not the language of an assessment.

You are known, all the way down, by somebody who is not counting. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture says thou hast searched me and known me, Psalm 139:1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a bench in a park while other people are talking about sleep.

The sum is not from God

Let me say plainly where that arithmetic comes from, because it feels like truth and it is not.

Comparison is a machine your mind runs to work out where you stand. It is fast, it is automatic, and it is entirely useless for anything that matters, because it can only handle things that are counted, and the things that actually decide a life are not counted.

Nowhere in Scripture does God run one woman's life against another's. Not once. There is no verse where a person's standing is calculated relative to a peer, and there is no book anywhere in which four out of five means anything at all.

You are not in a league table, and you never entered one. Scripture says the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the Holy Spirit is not comparing your spare room to anybody's box room.

Nobody is naming a cause here

I want to be as clear as I can, because you may have been handed things.

There is no cause to find. Nothing you did. No faith weighed and found short, no reason anybody is entitled to guess at, and anyone who has implied otherwise, however lovingly, was speaking outside Scripture and outside their authority.

And I am not going to promise you a child. That is not mine to promise and promising it would be a cruelty in a warm voice.

Their four are not an answer to a question about you. Two things happened in five lives and Scripture never once linked them.

You are not under a judgement and this is not a comparison. Scripture is willing to sit with a longing and not resolve it, Psalm 13:1-2, and the Holy Spirit does not require an answer before He is willing to be near you.

And you are still the one who remembers about the orange food

Here is something worth noticing, because the arithmetic has been hiding it.

You are the one who remembers which child will not eat anything orange. You are the one who turns up. You have held every one of those babies and meant it every time, in the same week as running the sum in the back of your head, and both of those were true at once.

That is not hypocrisy. That is a woman doing something quite hard and doing it well, and Scripture puts rejoicing and weeping side by side in one sentence, Romans 12:15, and the Holy Spirit is not confused by somebody doing both.

You have not become bitter, and the sum is not evidence that you have. Scripture says charity envieth not, and also that charity beareth all things, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping both of those alive in you at a park gate on a Saturday.