Fifty Years And A Tiredness That Does Not Fit

Nettie has done the coffee after the service at that church for fifty years.

Nursery before that, and the funeral dinners, and the flowers on the table, and for about twenty years she also drove the church van, which was a stick shift, uphill, in winter. Nobody made her do any of it. She loves it. If you told Nettie she had to stop she would fight you in the parking lot.

That Sunday the porch was full and the sun was doing what it does off the white boards, and everybody was standing around after in that good half hour where nobody wants to leave. Two of the young women came over laughing and took the tray of cups right out of her hands, the way you would take a bag from your grandmother, and one of them said, "We have got it, Miss Nettie, you go sit."

And Nettie's hands closed on that tray about half a second too long.

Then she let go and laughed and said something about how they had better wash them properly, and everybody laughed, and it was fine. It was a good morning. She talked to eleven people on that porch and meant every word of it.

But she pulled over on the ridge road driving home.

Not for anything. She just came around the bend where you can see the whole valley and she put the truck in park and sat there, and she was so tired she could hardly lift her arms. Not sleepy. That is the thing. She sleeps fine. This was the other kind, the kind that fifty years of work you love does not account for, and she has been feeling it more and more, and she has never once been able to explain it to herself.

Here is what she does not know yet, sitting up there with the valley in front of her.

There have been two things running under those fifty years, not one.

The first is love, and love does not do this to a person. Love makes a woman tired the way a garden makes you tired, which is a good ache that sleeps off. The second thing has no name in her yet. It is a quiet account she has been keeping, and the terms of it are that she stays in good standing with God by keeping her hands full. She could not tell you a number. There is no number. She only knows that on a week she does less, something in her chest draws up, and on the day two girls took a tray out of her hands, it drew up hard.

You have felt it. Maybe not on a porch and maybe not over cups. But you know the tiredness that your work does not explain, and you have half suspected for years that something is running underneath it.

Two things running, and only one of them is love

Start by taking the accusation out of the room. Nothing under those fifty years was fake. The love was real, the meals were real, the van in winter was real, and God is not going to look at a woman's life and say the good in it did not count.

But work done out of love and work done to stay in good standing look identical from the outside, and they feel completely different at the ridge road. One of them empties out and fills back up. The other one only empties.

And the second one is exhausting for a reason that makes perfect sense once somebody says it plainly: an account a person keeps on herself never closes. There is no Sunday you can point at and say, there, that one settled it. So the hands stay full, and the years go by, and a woman ends up parked on a ridge at one in the afternoon with her arms too heavy to lift.

So let the second thing be named and be done with. You are standing in a covenant that has never once measured a woman's place by how full her hands were, and Scripture puts no such measure anywhere in the terms of it. His Spirit is gentle about naming a thing like this in somebody, and He is not slow about ending it either.

Somebody else already settled the standing

Here is the sentence that ends the second thing, and it is worth reading twice because it is written in exchange language on purpose:

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.2 Corinthians 5:21

Look at the direction of the traffic in that verse. His to us, and ours to Him, and both directions completed at the same moment on the same hill by the same Person. Nobody is standing at the end of it with a slip in their hand.

And here is what happened to the account itself, in language a bookkeeper would recognize:

by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.Colossians 2:14

Canceled. Set aside. Nailed up where everybody could see it.

So take it, because it is yours already and not because you have earned a rest. You are the righteousness of God in Christ, which is a standing you did not manufacture on any porch and cannot lose in a week of doing less. 2 Corinthians 5:21 puts that in writing as an exchange already made, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it up the ridge road to where you are sitting with your arms too heavy to lift.

The word is retired, the work is not

Now hear the other half, because relief that goes too far turns into a different lie.

Nothing here excuses you from anything. The response is real and it is still asked. The same letter that says the record was canceled goes on asking for a life to be lived, and Paul says why in one sentence:

who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.Titus 2:14

Zealous for good works. Not released from them. The trays still get carried on that porch, and Nettie should carry some of them, because she is good at it and because it is a good thing to do.

What changes is the reason under the hands. The paying words go: settle, stay in good standing, keep up, fall behind. The responding words stay: love, answer, serve, walk, give. Same tray. Different woman carrying it.

So let the reason change and leave the hands where they are. You are family in this house and not somebody working off a balance, and His Spirit has never once driven a woman to keep herself current with God. Titus 2:14 says outright that Christ redeemed a people for His own possession, so the owning was finished first and the good works come along after it, in that order, every time Paul puts the two in the same sentence.

So here it is in one sentence, and this is the sentence to take home. What Christ settled is settled and it is His to have settled; what you do is your response and it is real and it is asked; and only one of those two is holding your place, and it is not the one with the tray in it.