Even To Hoar Hairs

Three hours. It used to be one and he is not exaggerating.

The lad on the other bench does it in about fifty minutes and does it well, and there is no story here about young people cutting corners, because he does not cut them. He is good and he will be very good.

And he watches him and does the sum.

He is sixty three. His hands are not what they were. His eyes are not what they were and the glasses only do so much, and there is a specific movement that used to be automatic and now has to be thought about, and thinking about it makes it worse.

He is not bitter and he likes the lad and he has taught him a great deal.

What he cannot say to anybody is what it is like to be inside this. Everyone around him is kind about it, which is not the same as understanding, and the kindness has a particular quality that he recognizes from how he used to be with the old man who trained him, and recognizing it is worse than the slowness.

You may know that bench. Not resentment. A genuine decline in what your hands do, and the specific loneliness of being treated kindly about it.

Carried, to the end

Here is a promise, and the thing to notice is what it does not offer.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Even to hoar hairs will I carry you.

Gray hair. He is naming the actual thing, and the whole verse is about a stage of life where a person is carried rather than carrying.

And read what He does not say. He does not say I will restore what you had. He does not say your hands will come back. There is nothing in that verse about the decline being reversed, and if there were, you would recognize it as flattery, because you know exactly what is happening to your hands.

What He says is: I have made, and I will bear.

Notice those two together. I have made. That is the whole of what you have been through your working life, the making, and He claims it as His own act. And then: I will bear. The one who made you is the one who now carries you, and it is the same person doing both.

You are carried by the same One who made you, and He named gray hair specifically. Isaiah 46:4 says even to hoar hairs will I carry you without offering restoration, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a man of sixty three doing the sum at a bench.

Now let me name what you are actually mourning, because I think you would want it named accurately.

It is not the hours. Three instead of one is annoying and you could live with annoying. What you are mourning is a version of yourself that was fast and did not have to think about it, and who is now available only as a memory, and who you are being kind about in exactly the way other people are being kind about you.

That is a real loss and it deserves to be called one. Nobody around you is going to call it that, because they are being kind.

You are losing something real, and God did not offer to give it back and did offer to carry you. The written word names the gray hairs and puts the making and the bearing in the same hand, and the Holy Spirit is not among the people being carefully kind about this.

The honest half. It goes on. Sixty three is not the end of the decline, and any message that hinted otherwise would be lying to a man who can do arithmetic.

And I am not going to tell you what to do about your work. I do not know your situation and it is not my business.

There is a part only you can do and it is honest rather than encouraging. You say plainly what you can no longer do. And then you say who is carrying you now, which is a different sentence from who is doing the work.