Forty Years And Never A Moment

She has heard Dot Fairley's story two hundred times and she could tell it better than Dot can.

It happens at a kitchen sink in 1979 with a radio on, and there is a bit about a dishcloth, and Dot always says the same thing at the same point, which is "and I had to sit down on the floor, love, right there on the lino," and everybody in the room always makes the same noise.

She has heard Bill Trescott's, which involves a hospital parking lot and is genuinely remarkable.

She has heard the young man who came for two years and then moved away, whose story took four minutes and had a truck in it.

She has never had one.

Forty-one years since the day, and if you asked her, and people have asked her, she would say something entirely honest that sounds like a deflection, which is: "Oh, it has been more of a long walk with me."

And that is true. It has been a very long walk. She has taught, and cleaned, and sat with the dying, and got up on Sunday mornings through two bereavements and one long illness and a period in her fifties that she has never described to anybody. She reads it every morning at the same table. She prays for eleven people by name.

But nobody has ever come away from a conversation with her carrying a moment, because there is not one to carry.

She is seventy-two, and here is the thing she has admitted to precisely nobody in seven decades: she has occasionally wondered whether the long walk is what people say when there was never a beginning.

Not seriously. Not as a crisis. It is a thought that comes in the small hours about twice a year and is gone by breakfast, and it never stays long enough to be dealt with, which is exactly why it has survived seventy-two years intact.

What has been drawing you

I want to start by telling you what I think the long walk actually is, because I do not believe it is a deflection, and I do not think you have ever heard anybody say so.

A moment is one shape that God's dealing with a person takes. It is not the shape, and Scripture is remarkably relaxed about this in a way that our conversations at the back of church are not.

There are people in the Bible who got knocked off a horse. There are also people who were simply there, from childhood, in the temple, in the household, and the text never once pauses to ask them when it started.

Now let me put underneath you the sentence that I think has been describing your seventy-two years the whole time.

Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

There are two halves and I want to take them separately.

An everlasting love. Everlasting runs in both directions. It does not begin when a person notices it. There was never a moment when it was not, which means for you specifically there is no starting line to go looking for and never was.

And then with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. Drawn. That is a long verb. It is not a verb about an instant. It is what you do with a rope, over time, steadily, and the person being drawn does not usually feel each pull.

You have been drawn for seventy-two years by lovingkindness, and that is not a kind thing to say to a woman with no story, it is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the small-hours thought rather than on your extremely well-furnished knowledge of Jeremiah.

Now let me go straight at the thought itself, because you have never let anybody near it and it has therefore never been answered.

Maybe the long walk is what people say when there was never a beginning.

Here is the answer. A woman who has got out of bed on Sunday mornings for forty-one years through two bereavements and one long illness and a season in her fifties she has never described to anybody is not a woman who was never begun. You have been kept, continuously, for four decades, and Scripture says the drawing is done with lovingkindness by a God whose love has no start date, and the Spirit of God has been the one getting a woman to that same table every morning for a length of time that no human enthusiasm survives.

I want to say something about Dot Fairley too, since we have all been in that kitchen.

You could tell her story better than she can. You have listened to it two hundred times and made the right noise every single time, and I do not think you have ever once begrudged her it, and that is worth saying out loud about you.

You have carried other people's beginnings for fifty years with real gladness. That is a ministry. It has a name in Scripture and the name is love, and the Spirit is the one who has kept it free of any bitterness, which at two hundred tellings is not a small preservation.

And here is the last of it, and it is the one I want in your kitchen at four in the morning the next time this comes round.

You are loved with an everlasting love and you were loved with it before 1979 and before Dot Fairley's lino. There is no beginning to find because the love has no beginning, and a walk that long is not evidence of a missing start. It is evidence of a very long rope, held at the other end, the whole way. Jeremiah 31:3 puts both halves of that in God's own mouth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been doing the drawing for seventy-two years.