The frame has been up in that room since February and there is no particular hurry about it.
She has made a great many quilts. Some of them are on beds in three counties and one of them is in a museum, which she finds ridiculous and mentions to everybody.
Here is the thing her daughter noticed and did not say anything about for a while.
She has started talking about her life in the past tense.
Not about dying. She is not morbid and she is not ill. It is small things. I used to be the one who. That was when I still did. In the days when I was any use with a needle, which is a nonsense because she is sitting at a frame with a needle in her hand as she says it.
Her daughter finally mentioned it, gently, over the frame.
Mum, you talk about yourself like you have already finished.
She laughed and said something about being seventy four. And then she went quiet for a bit and carried on stitching, and that evening after everybody had gone she sat in the chair and thought about it properly.
And what she found underneath was not a fear of the end at all.
It was a decision she had made without ever saying it out loud, which is that whether she gets to the end still recognisably herself is entirely down to her. Her own carefulness. Her own hanging on. Nobody else in it.
She has never said that to a living soul, and she would be embarrassed to.
If you have found something like that in yourself, come and sit at the frame. Nothing here is a warning and nobody is checking on you.
Every verb in that sentence belongs to Him
There is a sentence at the very end of Jude, and it is the best one in the letter, and almost everybody reads it too fast.
Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy.Jude 24
Slow down on the verbs and notice whose they are.
Able to keep you. Able to present you. Both of them His. Not one of them yours. The person in that sentence is not doing the keeping and is not doing the arriving. They are the one being brought.
And look at what is waiting at the end of it. Not relief. Not a narrow escape. Great joy, and the joy is His before it is ever yours, and He is the one bringing you into it.
You are being kept from stumbling, and the arriving was never on your list. Jude 24 puts every verb on God's side, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the guarantee of what is coming in Ephesians 1:14, which means the finish you have quietly taken responsibility for is being done to you rather than managed by you.
A woman at a frame with a needle in her hand has not finished
Now let me say the other thing plainly, because it needs saying and nobody has said it to you.
You are not in the past tense. You are stitching. There is a frame up in your front room and there has been since February and it is not done, and neither are you, and one of those facts is as ordinary and factual as the other.
Nobody is telling you how the years ahead will go. I cannot and nobody should, and anybody who hands you a prediction about your own health or your own mind is selling you something.
But there is no alarm here either, and nothing is at risk in the way you have quietly assumed. You are held by somebody who does not get tired, and you are held this afternoon. 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 carefulness ran out.
Paul had both hands of this in one letter. He said he was persuaded that God was able to guard what he had entrusted to Him, and in the same breath he told a tired young man to guard what had been entrusted to him, by the Holy Spirit. Two deposits, and the weight is not on the person.
You have not been left to hold this up, and you were never the last line of anything. 2 Timothy 1:12 says He is able to guard what has been committed to Him until that day, and it is His Spirit who runs the whole of that distance, so the quiet decision you made about your own ending was never actually assigned to you.
God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. That is the whole of this site and it is the whole of this afternoon.
Something is on this frame for you, in a front room or a kitchen or wherever you are reading this.
You have a keeper who is able, in the present tense, and the finishing is His work rather than the sum of your carefulness. Philippians 1:6 says the One who began a good work in you brings it to completion, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the seal on that, which means the end of your road is not a thing you have to hold up with two hands and a needle.
Put the weight down. Not the stitching. Not the kindness, not the ordinary keeping you have done for fifty years. Just the weight. The part where the outcome is personally yours to secure.
You are not less watchful without it. You are simply watching from inside somebody else's keeping, and that is the only place watchfulness has ever been able to rest.
Declare this over yourself
You speak these as somebody standing in a place given to you rather than earned. The authority is Christ's own and delegated, and it is the Spirit named in Jude and Ephesians who does the keeping and the presenting rather than your carefulness. How the years actually go is His to decide, so leave the outcome with Him and simply say what is true.
- Past tense I put myself into, you are the wrong tense and I am still at the frame. Jude says He is able to keep me from stumbling and to present me with great joy, and His Spirit is the guarantee on all of it. You go down beside this chair tonight.
- Decision I never said out loud, you are not mine to carry, and in the name of Jesus I set you outside the door. Scripture says He does not faint or grow weary, and His Spirit keeps a person going long past their own carefulness. Whether I finish this well was never mine alone to secure.
- Father, You are able to guard what I entrusted to You until that day, and You are doing it this afternoon while the needle is still going. I hand You the keeping of the sentence I want to be true of me. I finish this road held, and the joy at the end of it was Your idea first.
Jude 24
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