Living Off One Good Year

She calls it the good year and everybody in that family knows which one she means, and none of them have ever heard the whole story.

It was 1985 for Vera and she was thirty-six, and something happened over about eleven months that she has never fully described to anybody, including her husband, who is gone now and who knew that she would not.

She is seventy-seven.

And this spring, doing something ordinary at the sink, she caught the shape of what she has been doing since, and it is this: she has been living off it.

Not remembering it. Living off it. There is a difference and she found it in about four seconds and it has been sitting with her since.

She takes it out on hard days. That is the phrase in her own head: takes it out. When something is bad she goes back to the good year, and she goes through it in order, and it steadies her, and it has steadied her through two funerals and a bad decade and a stretch in her sixties when she could not sleep.

And she has not been fed since.

Not properly, and not because nobody has offered. She goes. She reads. She has one of the best-thumbed Bibles in that congregation and everybody would tell you she is a woman of prayer.

But somewhere in about 1990 she stopped expecting anything new and started rationing something old, and forty years of careful rationing is a thing you can do without ever noticing, especially if what you are rationing is genuinely good.

She said it out loud at the sink, and it came out plainer than she meant.

I am keeping house on one year.

And you may have your own. Yours may be a week or a season or one particular night, and it may be entirely real, and you may have been taking it out on the hard days for a very long time.

The invitation is to come and eat now, and it is nearly annoyed

Take this off first, my love, because you have carried it forty years and it was never yours.

You are not living on the last of a supply. You never were. Scripture puts a nearly impatient invitation in front of people who are spending themselves on what does not feed them, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a memory, who does the feeding. Set it down here beside the bowl. It is heavy, and there is nothing shameful under it.

Now hear it, and hear the tone, because the tone is unusual.

Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.Isaiah 55:2

That is not gentle. It is very nearly exasperated, and it is exasperated on the reader's behalf rather than at them.

Listen, listen. Eat what is good.

And notice the tense. Not remember what was good. Not be grateful for what you were given. Eat, now, what is good now, and the invitation is issued to people with empty hands who are working hard for something that is not food.

That invitation is open to you today. Right now, at seventy-seven, at a sink in the spring. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who spreads it, and He has never once told anybody to make an old year last.

Now let me be careful, my love, because a page like this could do damage.

Nothing here is a comment on how your church does anything or how often. That belongs to your church, it stays exactly where it is, and I am not putting a view about it in your head.

And nothing here says the good year was not real or that you should stop taking it out. It was real. God did that and He did it to you and it has steadied a woman through two funerals and a decade she does not talk about, and Scripture is full of people told to remember what was done.

The point is only that remembering was never meant to be the meal, and Scripture keeps issuing the invitation in the present tense, and His Spirit is the one who has been setting food out for forty years while a good woman ate carefully from a memory.

Here is the tender part, and I say it as I would over a pot of tea. You did not ration it out of unbelief.

You rationed it because it was the best thing that ever happened to you and you were frightened of using it up, and that is what a person does with something precious and finite. The mistake is only in the word finite, and nobody told you it was the wrong word. His Spirit has been at that sink and He is not disappointed in a single one of the forty years.