The Hill She Can Still Get Up

Thirty years of the same hill, most weeks, and she used to do it without ever once looking at a watch.

It is not a mountain. It is a good steady pull of about forty minutes with two places you stop and pretend to look at the view.

She is sixty nine.

Here is what she started doing about a year ago and has told nobody.

She times it.

Not on purpose at first. She glanced at her phone at the gate and then again at the top and the number stayed with her, and the next week she did it again on purpose, and now she does it every time.

Forty one minutes. Forty three. Thirty nine on a good day and she is very pleased about thirty nine.

And on the weeks it is forty five, she comes down that hill and she is not thinking about her legs. She is thinking about the whole of the rest of her life, and about her mother, and about whether this is what it looks like when it starts.

That is what has actually happened. A walk has turned into a report, and the report is not about a walk, and she has never once said any of this out loud because it would sound absurd. She walks a hill at sixty nine. Most of her friends do not.

If you have started timing something, come and sit at the top a minute. There is no warning here and nobody is assessing you.

Fresh and green is a promise about later, not a target

There is a line at the end of a psalm that says something about old age which almost nobody quotes because it is not what people expect.

They still bear fruit in old age. They are ever full of sap and green.Psalm 92:14

Look at the tense and look at who is doing it. Bearing fruit is what a tree does because of where it is planted, and the verse before it says exactly that: planted in the house of the LORD, they flourish in the courts of our God.

The greenness is not an achievement of the tree. It is a description of the ground.

That matters on a hill with a phone in your hand, because you have been reading your own condition as a forecast, and the psalm reads it as a location.

You are planted somewhere that keeps things green, and that is true this morning at forty five minutes. Psalm 92:14 puts the flourishing in the ground rather than in the tree's effort, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Ephesians 3:16 names as the strength in the inner being, which means the number at the top of that hill is not a report on your future.

The stopwatch is not watchfulness

Now let me name what has happened, because it is not carefulness and you know that it is not.

Watchfulness notices and lets go. What you have is a measurement that has attached itself to a fear, and every week it returns a verdict, and the verdict is always provisional, and so you have to go back up the hill and get another one.

That is not looking after yourself. That is an appeal you cannot stop lodging.

And underneath it there is a claim: that the rest of your life is being determined on that hill and that the number is the evidence.

There is not a line in Scripture that puts the shape of a person's ending in their own legs.

You are not being assessed on that hill, and there is no verdict pending. Jude 24 says He is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless with great joy, and every verb in it belongs to God, and it is His Spirit who is the guarantee of what is coming, so the report you keep going up to collect was never actually commissioned.

And I am not going to tell you how your body will go. Nobody can and nobody should, and anybody handing you a prediction about your own legs or your own mother's illness is selling you something.

But there is no alarm here either. You are held by somebody who does not get tired, and you are held right now, as you read. Isaiah 40:28 says He does not faint or grow weary and His understanding is unsearchable, and it is His Spirit within you who keeps a person going long past the point where their own strength ran out.

God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you, and that is why a hill can go back to being a hill.