What Is Asked Of Someone My Age

They still hold the homecoming on the lawn the second Sunday in June, and Ruby still comes, and this year she came in a car somebody else drove.

There was a time she ran the whole thing. She would be there by seven with the tables in the back of the truck, and by eight she had the chairs out in rows and the coffee going and three pies cooling under dish towels, and she would have driven two widows in from up the creek and gone back for a third. Nobody asked her to do any of that. She just did it, for about thirty-five years, and the summer she turned fifty-one she did it with a broken toe.

This June she sat in a chair somebody carried over for her and watched her daughter's boy take the folding chairs up from the yard two at a time, whistling, not even breathing hard.

The grandchildren were all over her. The littlest one had a june bug in a jar and wanted her to look at it about nine times, and Ruby laughed until she had to hold her side. It was a good afternoon. Anybody watching would have said she was the happiest woman on that lawn.

And she was. And underneath it, the whole time, the other thing was running.

Because Ruby keeps a private measure, and the measure is a woman of forty with a truck bed full of tables. She grades every day she lives now against that woman. She never says it out loud. She would be embarrassed to. But she goes to bed most nights having quietly come up short against somebody who does not exist anymore, and on the days her hip is bad she comes up very short indeed.

Somebody prayed over the food, and Ruby bowed her head with everyone else, and what went through her mind was not a prayer. It was a question, and it has been sitting there for about four years now.

What is even asked of somebody my age?

That is your question too, or you would not still be reading. Maybe your version is the knees, or the tremor, or the fact that you cannot drive after dark now, or that the fatigue arrives at two in the afternoon like a train and nothing gets done after it. You are not asking out of self-pity. You genuinely want to know what is being asked of you in the body you actually have this evening, because you would very much like to do it.

The question is a good one, and Scripture asks it out loud

First, be easy about the question itself. It is not ingratitude and it is not a crisis of faith. A man in the Psalms asks it in almost your exact words, after God had brought him through something that nearly killed him:

What shall I render to the LORD for all his benefits to me?Psalm 116:12

He does not answer with a schedule. He answers with this:

I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD.Psalm 116:13

Lift the cup. Call on the name. That is the response, and look at what it takes: a hand and a voice. It can be done in a chair on a lawn while somebody else carries the chairs.

And the response is real. I am not shrinking it into a feeling. Lifting the cup means taking hold of what God has given you rather than watching it go by, and calling on the name means opening your mouth to Him out loud. You are asked for both, and you are able for both this evening, because Psalm 116:13 was written by a man with nothing left but a hand and a voice, and the Holy Spirit did not put it in the book as a consolation prize for the tired.

The ask sits on something settled

Before I say another word about what is asked, look at what it stands on. God said this in the first person, to people who were afraid they were finished:

fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.Isaiah 41:10

Strengthen, help, uphold. Three verbs, all His, none of them yours.

So here are the two halves, and I want them side by side where you can see them. God's commitment to strengthen and uphold you is settled; it was settled in His own mouth and your hip has no vote in it. Your response is real, it is genuinely asked, and it is not the thing holding you up. One of those two is load bearing and it is not the one with the bad hip.

You have God's word that the upholding is His job, and Isaiah 41:10 is written down in the first person, and His Spirit is the one pressing that in against the four years of quiet grading you have been doing on yourself.

What is asked, plainly, and it is not a schedule

Now the ask itself. Here it is, and notice how short the list is when God writes it Himself:

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?Micah 6:8

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God. Not one of those three is a quantity. There is no bushel measure on kindness and no mileage on humility. A woman of forty with a truck full of tables and a woman of eighty in a chair are asked for exactly the same three things, and they are both able for them, and the second one is often better at them.

That is what has been hidden from you. You have been comparing volume, and God never once asked you for volume. He asked you for justice, kindness and a humble walk, and He asked it of the person you are, not the person you were.

And hear this, because it is where the ache gets in. A response that takes you all week is a response. A phone call you meant to make Tuesday and made Friday is a made phone call. Slow is not the same as failing, and nobody in Scripture is ever graded on speed. You have been carrying a standard God did not set, and Micah 6:8 is written plain enough that a child could read it out, and the Spirit is the one setting that shorter standard down in front of you now.