The Last Week of the Month

You have a way of doing the last week now and it has taken four years to perfect.

The freezer gets rearranged around the twentieth so the things at the back come forward. The heating goes on at four instead of two, and you have a blanket over your knees and a cardigan on and you are not cold, and you would say so to anybody who asked.

You do not go to the Wednesday coffee morning in the last week. You did the first year. You went and had a coffee and put the coin down and it was fine, and then one month it was not fine, and rather than have that conversation with yourself again you developed a small illness that arrives on the fourth Wednesday and always clears by the first.

Nobody knows. That is the achievement and it is also the loneliest part of it.

Four years since he died. The pension arrives on the same day it always arrived. It just does not go as far as it went, because everything else moved and it did not, and there is no drama in that and no story to tell.

You are not destitute. You want to be clear about that, even here, even now, because you have watched what happens to a woman who lets herself be pitied.

But it is the last week again, and the freezer has been rearranged, and you have not said the sentence out loud to a single soul in four years.

The psalm puts young lions in it on purpose

There is a line in Psalm 34 that people quote and mostly skip the first half of.

The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing.Psalm 34:10

The young lions are the strong ones. They are the fastest and the best equipped and the ones with every natural advantage, and the psalm says plainly that they go hungry.

That is not decoration. David is knocking out an idea before he builds on it. He is saying that being capable is not what secures a person, because capability runs out and does run out, visibly, in lions.

Then he sets the other thing beside it. They that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.

Note what that does and does not promise. It does not promise abundance and it does not promise the last week balances. It says a person who seeks God is not short of what is genuinely good, and it puts the definition of good back in God's hands rather than in the freezer.

You are not outside that sentence because your month does not stretch. I am not offering my own opinion here. Scripture says they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing, Psalm 34:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a kitchen on the twenty-third with a blanket over a pair of knees.

We are not explaining these four years

I will not do it and I want to say so plainly.

I am not going to tell you what God is teaching you through a short month. I do not know. Nobody does, and a woman of your years has heard enough people find a lesson in somebody else's thin week to know what that sentence usually is.

Not a season with a purpose you must accept. Not discipline. Not a refining you are somewhere in the middle of. Scripture is willing to leave a hard stretch unexplained, Psalm 88:18, and the Holy Spirit does not require an explanation to be accepted before He will sit down in the room with you.

You are not being taught a lesson in the last week of the month. You are in the last week of the month, and God is in the kitchen.

The Wednesday you stopped going to

Here is the part that is actually costing you, and it is not the freezer.

It is the fourth Wednesday. Four years of a small manufactured illness, four years of a coffee morning you would enjoy, four years of a room full of women who like you and who would be genuinely glad to see you and who have no idea why you go quiet at the end of every month.

The reason you stay away is not the coin. The reason is that you cannot bear to be the one somebody notices.

I understand that, and it is not vanity, and I am not going to lecture you about pride. A woman who has kept a household upright her whole life does not learn a new posture at seventy because a page suggested it.

But hear the cost. Loneliness in the last week is not a consequence of the pension. It is a consequence of the arrangement you made to keep the pension private, and those are two different things, and only one of them is fixed.

You have not been asked to carry this in silence. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and the Holy Spirit did not write that verse for everybody except the woman who has always been the one carrying.

What dignity actually is

Dignity is not never needing anything. That is a definition the world sells and it costs people their friendships.

Dignity is being fully yourself in front of God and in front of the people who love you. It survives an honest sentence. It does not survive four years of a fictional illness on the fourth Wednesday.

You do not have to announce anything. You do not have to make a speech, or hand anybody a figure, or let one person in this world call you poor.

You could say one sentence to one woman you trust. That the end of the month is tight, and has been for a while, and that you would rather she knew.

You are held whether or not you ever say it, and you are held better when you do. Scripture says a friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity, Proverbs 17:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one who usually arrives in a household through somebody else's kitchen door.