The Basement In Nineteen Seventy Four

She can still tell you where the pipe ran across the ceiling and which of the folding chairs had the wobble.

The basement of the Bethel church on Prater Road, third week of August, 1974. A visiting preacher whose name she has forgotten. A piano so out of tune it made people laugh before it made anybody sing. Twenty six of them down there on a Wednesday because the sanctuary was being painted, and no one had thought the week would come to anything.

She was twenty nine. She had two children and a husband who had started drinking in a way she did not yet have a word for, and she had gone down those stairs mostly because it got her out of the house.

She does not tell what happened. She has said one sentence about it in fifty one years, to her sister, and the sentence was: "I went down them stairs one woman and I come up another."

She is eighty now.

And here is what she said to me, in her own front room, in the chair she has had since her husband died, with her hands folded on the arm of it: "I have been trying to get back down them stairs for fifty one years and I ain't never once made it."

I want to sit with that a while before I say anything to it, because there is more honesty in that sentence than in most of what gets said in a church, and it deserves better than a quick answer.

But then I want to hand her something. Because there is a mistake in it, and it is a small one, and she has carried it half a century.

He never asked you to carry it

There is a place in Isaiah where God is making fun, in a gentle sort of way, of the gods people build. He points out that they have to be loaded onto animals. Somebody has to lift them. They are cargo. They ride, and the people carry.

Then He turns it around.

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

Take that in your own chair. You are cargo in that verse and not the carrier. The word says I have made, and I will bear, and I will carry, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been doing every bit of the lifting for fifty one years.

Read who is doing the lifting in that sentence. Four times over. I have made, I will bear, I will carry, I will deliver. There is not one thing in that verse for a woman to hoist onto her own back.

Now hear this in your chair, and know it is not me being kind to an old woman, it is what is written: you are being carried right now, as you read this. His word says even to gray hair He carries, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a true thing about this Tuesday and not just a nice line for a funeral.

Fifty one years you have been trying to lift something that has been carrying you.

There was a man in England, back in the seventeen hundreds, met by God in a little room he did not want to be in, while a fellow read out loud from a preface. His heart was strangely warmed, he wrote. Everybody knows that half.

Here is the half that stays in the book. He wrote a few days later that he could not feel any of it, and he went on writing entries like that for years. And in all those years he built a timetable and rode a quarter of a million miles on horseback, preached in fields because the buildings were shut against him, stood in mine yards at five in the morning, and went into prisons over and over with folks who could not do a thing for him back.

He put small groups together that met at a fixed hour, where a few people asked each other plain questions out loud. The name that got hung on them was somebody's joke about how methodical they were, and they kept it, because it fit.

He never spent one afternoon trying to get back down the stairs at Aldersgate.

A warmed heart with no method goes cold. A method with no warmth is a timetable and nothing else. He had both, and he had both because he let God do the carrying and he did the walking.

You are not required to reproduce it. Set that down slowly, because it has been on your back since Nixon was president. There is nowhere in Scripture that says a woman must manufacture the feeling of 1974 in order to be in the same standing she was in on those stairs. His word says He carries even to gray hair, and His Spirit is the one doing it, in a front room, in a chair, at eighty.

And that basement was real. I will not let anybody call it emotion and a bad piano. He came down those stairs after a twenty nine year old with two babies and a husband she was frightened of, and He knew exactly what she needed and He gave it to her. He is just not obliged to do it twice to a woman who has never once forgotten it.