The Photograph At The End Of The Hall

There is a photograph at the end of her hallway that she walks past about forty times a day.

It is from a summer when she was about forty. She is on a beach with three children and one of them is upside down, and she is laughing at something outside the frame, and she looks, by any measure, extremely alive.

She has always liked that picture.

Here is what she has started doing with it, and she noticed it about six months ago and has told nobody.

She measures herself against it.

Not her looks. She is not vain and she never has been. It is more that she looks at the woman in that photograph and she thinks: she would have done more today. She would have rung her sister. She would have got up when the alarm went instead of lying there. She had more in her.

And underneath that there is a sentence she has never once said out loud.

The rest of my life is about not becoming less than her.

She is sixty six. There is nothing wrong with her. She walks, she cooks for everybody, she is at everything.

But she has turned the whole of the remaining stretch into a defense, and a defense is a very tiring way to live, and it has been going on quietly for about two years while everybody has been telling her how well she looks.

If you have been measuring yourself against a photograph, sit down and have some cake. There is no warning here and nobody is assessing you.

The One who does not grow weary is not the woman in the picture

There is a passage in Isaiah written to people who had concluded that God had stopped paying attention, and the answer comes as a question about tiredness.

Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary. His understanding is unsearchable.Isaiah 40:28

And then, four verses later, the famous part: those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Look at where the energy comes from in that. Not from the people. They are described, in the verse in between, as young men who fall exhausted, which is Isaiah's way of saying that the fittest available version of a human being still runs out.

The strength is borrowed. That is the entire proposal.

You are being carried by somebody who does not get tired, and you are being carried this afternoon. Isaiah 40:28 puts the tirelessness in God rather than in any version of you, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the strength within a person in Ephesians 3:16, which means the woman in that photograph was borrowing too, and neither of you was ever running on your own supply.

The rest of this is not a defense

Now let me name the thing you have been doing, because you have never named it and it is heavy.

You have made your remaining years into a rearguard action. Every day is now assessed against a version of yourself from a summer twenty six years ago, and every day loses, because that is what happens when you set the present against a photograph.

And underneath it is a claim about what the last stretch is for. You have decided it is for not declining.

There is not a line in Scripture that says that. The last stretch, everywhere it is described, is about arriving, and the arriving is done to you.

Jude finishes his letter with: to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy. Able to keep. Able to present. Not one verb belongs to the person, and the destination is joy rather than a score.

You are not defending anything, and there is no position you have to hold. Jude 24 puts the keeping and the presenting on God's side, and it is His Spirit who is the guarantee of what is coming, so the campaign you have been running for two years was never actually declared.

And I will not tell you how the years will go. Nobody can and nobody should, and anybody handing you a prediction about your own body or your own energy is selling you something.

But there is no alarm here. You are held by somebody who does not get tired, and you are held right now, as you read. Psalm 92:14 says they still bear fruit in old age and stay fresh and green, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that in a person rather than a woman's determination not to slip.

God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you, and that is why the woman in the hallway can be simply a photograph again.