The Sister Who Called Me First

Her phone rings before the ambulance has left the street.

That is not an exaggeration and it is not a joke she makes about herself. On this last one, on Sunday, she was called at eleven minutes past six in the morning, and the family had not yet called the funeral home, and she knows that because she was the one who called the funeral home.

She is the one everybody rings.

She knows what the forms are called. She knows which of the two homes in town will do a graveside without pushing you into the chapel package. She knows which cousin to call so that she calls the other four. She knows that on the second day somebody has to go into that house and clear out the refrigerator and that nobody will think of it and that if it is not done it will be a small quiet disaster on the fourth day.

She has done this eleven times in six years. Her own church. Her sister in law's church. Twice for people she had never met, because somebody said, call her, she will know what to do.

And here is the sentence she has never said out loud to a single human being.

Nobody has ever come and sat down with me.

Her mother died in that six years. Right in the middle of it. And people were kind, and there were flowers, and about nine people said, you know I am here if you need anything, which is a sentence that puts the whole weight of the asking on the person least able to lift it.

Nobody came and sat down. Nobody rang at eleven minutes past six in the morning to find out how she was going to get through a Sunday. And she has never once mentioned it, because how would she, and to whom, and what would she even be asking for.

She would sound like she was complaining about being useful.

So she takes the calls. She is going to take the next one too. And somewhere under all of it there is a thing she cannot look at directly, which is a kind of tiredness that sleep does not touch.

If anybody has looked at a phone on the arm of a chair like that, stay with me. There is half a verse at the end of Colossians that has been sitting there for two thousand years with her name in it.

Paul names the people who were a comfort to him

Here is the line, at the end of a letter, in among the greetings that most people skim.

And Jesus, which is called Justus, who are of the circumcision. These only are my fellowworkers unto the kingdom of God, which have been a comfort unto me.Colossians 4:11

Stop on the last five words. Which have been a comfort unto me.

That is Paul. The one who wrote the passage about the God of all comfort. The one everybody in the first century wrote to when something went wrong. The one in prison who is still, in this very letter, encouraging churches he has never visited.

And he stops, near the end, and names three men, and says these have been a comfort to me.

He is not embarrassed by it. He does not soften it. He does not say I did not really need it but it was nice of them. He names them and he says what they were, and it went into Scripture and it is still there.

You are named in that same sentence as somebody who needs comforting, and you were inside it through every one of the eleven times you were the one who knew what to do. Colossians 4:11 is the written word putting an apostle on the receiving end without one word of apology, and the Spirit who breathed that line is in a front room at seven in the evening with a woman who has not taken her coat off.

And notice something about how it happened for Paul. Nobody appointed those three men. There is no committee in that verse. They were simply there, in Rome, near him, and their being near him was the comfort.

You have needed that same thing all along and you were never wrong to need it, and you needed it in the six years when nobody thought you did. Colossians 4:11 names the comfort of ordinary people as the thing that sustained an apostle in a prison, and the Holy Spirit does not have a separate category of person who is meant to run on nothing.

Capable is not a spiritual gift and it is not a sentence

Now let me name what has happened to her on that street, because she has not named it and it has been doing damage.

She became the capable one. And a capable one, in most churches and most towns, quietly stops being a person and starts being a function.

That is not anybody's malice. Every single one of those people would be horrified. It is what happens when somebody is good at a hard thing: the room's imagination closes around them. After the fourth or fifth time, nobody in that town is able to picture her at eleven minutes past six on the morning after her own mother, because the picture they have of her is the one where she is calling the funeral home.

And she has helped it along. Everybody in her position does. She answered the phone in a steady voice while her own mother was three weeks dead, and every person who heard that voice filed her one notch further away from needing anything.

That is not a failure on her part. It is a groove that got worn in.

You are a person in that town and not a service, and you were a person on every one of the eleven calls. Nothing anywhere in the written word turns a capable woman into a permanent supply, and the Spirit of God has never once looked at somebody who copes and stopped counting her among the ones being carried.

You do not have to stop going in order to start receiving

Now I want to be careful, because there is a bad version of this teaching and I do not want it anywhere near her.

The bad version says: stop taking the calls. Set a boundary. Let somebody else do it. Look after yourself first.

I am not going to say that, and not because it would be unkind, but because it is a trade she never should have been offered. She is not doing the wrong thing. The eleven times were real and they were good and God saw every one of them, including the two for people she had never met.

The problem was never that she gives. The problem is that the road has only ever run one direction, and the answer to a one way road is not to stop the traffic. It is to open the other lane.

So she can take the call on Sunday and still be a woman who is sat down with on Wednesday. Those two are not in competition and they never were.

You are permitted to keep going and be carried at the same time, and you were never given a choice between the two. Galatians 6:2 lays the bearing of one another's burdens on the whole church without exempting the woman who always answers the phone, and the Holy Spirit does not ask anybody to choose between serving and being served.