I Forgot What It Was For

Second and fourth Sunday, and she has not missed one in nineteen years except the two weeks her mother died.

She is there at seven. She knows how long the urn takes and which of the four teapots pours badly and that the woman who does the flowers will be twenty minutes late and will apologize, and she has stopped saying it is fine because it has become a routine between them and neither of them means it anymore.

The tables go out the same way. She could do it in the dark. She has trained six people to do it and two of them do it properly.

Nineteen years and she has never once let anybody down.

And a two weeks ago she was carrying a stack of cups across the hall at about half past eight and something in her said, quite clearly: I cannot remember the last time I wanted to be here.

She stopped in the middle of the hall for a second. Then she carried on, because the cups were heavy.

She has told nobody. What would she even say. Nothing is wrong. She is not resentful and she does not want to stop and nobody has done anything to her.

She simply cannot find the thing that used to be underneath it, and she has begun to think that wanting to was never part of the arrangement.

If you have done a good thing on empty for years, you know exactly what I mean.

What was supposed to be underneath it

Let me put the verse in front of you, because it has a preposition in it that is doing all the work.

For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.Galatians 5:13

By love serve one another. Not with love added on top of the serving as a garnish. By it, the way you say a boat moves by sail.

Paul is naming the engine. And notice what he is not doing: he is not telling anybody to work up a feeling before they set out the chairs. He is describing what is supposed to be underneath, which means when it is not underneath, something has been running on something else.

You have been running on duty. Duty is a good engine and it is why nineteen years happened, and there is no shame anywhere in it. It is a genuine virtue and most of what gets done in any church gets done by people with it.

It is also not what the verse names, and it does not resupply itself.

You have been called to something with love underneath it, and the love was never a bonus feature. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Galatians 5:13, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

So the two weeks ago moment in the middle of the hall was not a failure. You have a real thing to notice and you noticed it, and noticing it is not the beginning of quitting. The word settled that long before your first second Sunday, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in that hall while you read this.

What this page is not going to tell you

Here is where an article like this usually goes wrong, and I am going to say plainly that it is not going where you think.

It is not going to tell you to rekindle it. There is no exercise on this page for producing love, because love is not producible by effort, and if there were such an exercise you would do it faithfully for six weeks the way you do everything and end up further away.

It is also not going to tell you to stop. Nobody here knows whether nineteen years should be twenty or whether it is time somebody else did it, and a page that told you either would be pretending to a knowledge it does not have. That is between you and God and the people who actually know your life.

What it will say is this: the thing you noticed is worth taking to God directly, as a fact rather than as a confession. Not I am sorry I do not want to be here. Just: I cannot find it, and I know it is meant to be the engine.

That is a completely legitimate sentence to bring, and Scripture is full of people bringing plainer ones.

You have somewhere to take an honest report, and the report does not have to be dressed up first. Galatians 5 names love as the means rather than the ornament; His Spirit is the one who supplies a thing that no amount of duty can manufacture.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of why you cannot stop is that somebody near you would make you pay for it, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.