Two Generations in One House

Her mother is at one end of the hallway and the two grandchildren are at the other, and she is somewhere in the middle of it from about six in the morning.

It was supposed to be temporary twice. Her mother came after the second fall, which was two years and four months ago. The grandchildren came in March, for reasons the family does not discuss much and which are not anybody in this house's fault.

She is sixty one.

The days have a shape now. Her mother needs turning and helping and talking to, and there is a medication schedule she could recite backwards. The children need breakfast and school and the school gate and homework and the enormous emotional weather of a six year old whose life changed in March.

She does all of it. She does it well, which anybody would tell you, and she has stopped noticing that people say so.

What she has not said out loud, to her daughter or her sister or the doctor, is what happened three weeks ago on a Tuesday.

She was in the hallway between the two doors. Her mother had called and one of the children had called, at the same time, and she stopped in the middle and she could not decide which way to go. Not for a long time. Maybe fifteen seconds. But she stood in her own hallway and could not choose, and then she went left, and she has thought about those fifteen seconds every day since.

The sentence, unsaid: there is not enough of me for both ends of this house.

You may know that hallway. Two doors, and something in you that has run out.

The promise is addressed to the faint

There is a line near the end of Isaiah forty that is aimed with unusual precision, and the precision is the whole comfort.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.Isaiah 40:29

Two groups named. The faint, and those who have no might. Not the strong who need topping up. Not the capable who are running slightly low. People who have run out, described in two different ways in one sentence so that nobody misses it.

That is a strange way to write a promise unless the writer intended it to find exactly one kind of reader, and he did.

You are named twice in that verse and not once, and Isaiah 40:29 addresses the faint and those with no might rather than the resourceful, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a line written to a worn out people and lands it on a woman standing in a hallway between two doors.

Being faint is not a failure of character

Consider what the verse does not do, because everything she has been quietly telling herself is in the gap.

It does not ask how they got faint. It does not distinguish between the ones who spent themselves well and the ones who spent themselves badly. It does not suggest that a better organized person would still have strength.

It names a condition and then it names a supply, and it puts the supply entirely in God's hands. He gives. He increases. Both verbs are His.

You have a condition that Scripture answers rather than investigates, because the written word names the faint as recipients and never once as suspects, and His Spirit is what turns a comfort she could quote into something that reaches the middle of a hallway.

And notice what comes just before it in the chapter. Isaiah has spent twenty verses on how large God is, on nations as a drop in a bucket and mountains weighed in scales. He does all of that, and then the application is not that we should be impressed. It is that He gives power to the faint.

You are the point that whole chapter has been building toward, and Isaiah 40 spends its enormity on the sky and then spends its conclusion on one exhausted person, and the same Spirit who inspired that turn is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one person

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

A woman of sixty one caring for a parent who needs turning and two small children in the same house, alone, from six in the morning, is carrying more than one adult should carry, and saying so is not a criticism of how she is doing it. Tell the doctor plainly what the days actually contain, including the fifteen seconds in the hallway, rather than waiting to be asked about it. Use the word respite, which the people who most need it are reliably the last to say out loud. Ask about a social worker, who can see options a family cannot see from inside a house. And if there is one other adult who could take one thing off the list, ask badly rather than not at all.

And if the tiredness has begun to go somewhere heavier than tiredness, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Handing something over is not a reduction in love for anybody in that house. You are held exactly as much on the day you ask for help as on the day you do all of it, because Isaiah 40:29 makes the faint the recipients rather than the accused, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in the body rather than only in the understanding.