Able to Keep Her From Stumbling

She has said the other sentence so many times that people believe it, and it is true as far as it goes.

I am not afraid of dying. She says it to her daughter, who finds it upsetting, and to the woman who comes on Thursdays, and she said it to a young minister who visited in the spring and looked relieved.

It is true. She is seventy nine, she has buried most of the people she started with, and the actual dying holds very little terror for her. She has watched it three times and it was not what people imagine.

What she has never said to anybody, in any form, is the other thing.

She is afraid of being found wanting.

Not of hell, exactly, and she would struggle to put it in doctrinal terms, and she has been in church for seventy of her seventy nine years and could tell you the right answer to this question if you asked her about somebody else. It is more specific and more humiliating than a doctrine. It is the picture of arriving, and of everything being visible at once, and of a moment in which it turns out that she was not what she appeared to be, in front of everybody she has ever known.

There is a particular week in her twenties she still thinks about. There is the way she was with her sister for about eleven years. There is a general sense, hard to pin down, of having got away with things.

She has never said this out loud because it sounds like a lack of faith, and because she is the one in her family who is supposed to be settled about all this.

Sit down at the table. There is a sentence written for exactly that arrival and it is worth reading slowly.

Somebody is presenting you

Here it is, and the thing to watch is who is doing the work in the sentence.

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

Able to keep you. Able to present you. Both verbs in Jude 24 belong to Him, and both of them are about the exact moment you are afraid of, and the Spirit inspired the doxology in that shape. The Spirit inspired that doxology at the very end of a short and difficult letter, which is where a writer puts the thing he most wants left in the reader.

And then the last three words, which most people read straight past: with great joy. That is not describing your reaction. In the sentence, the joy belongs to the presentation itself. You are being brought in by Somebody who is glad about it.

You are the one being presented rather than the one being examined, and Jude 24 puts both the keeping and the presenting in His hands, and the Spirit inspired the phrase about joy so that nobody would picture that room as a tribunal.

Notice the word blameless as well. It is not saying you will be found to have had a clean record. It is saying you will be presented that way, which is a different thing entirely and it is the whole of the gospel in one participle.

The week in her twenties

Now the specific material, because generalities will not touch it.

There is a week. There is the eleven years with your sister. There is a sense of having got away with things.

Nothing here is going to tell you that those were small. Some of them may not have been. What can be said is what happens to them in that sentence: they do not go into the presentation, because the presentation is not an audit and the one presenting you is the one who dealt with them.

That is not a way of making light of it. It is heavier than making light of it. It cost something, and the cost is precisely why the presentation can be described as joyful rather than as tense.

You are not carrying that week into the room. What is written says He presents you blameless, and the Spirit is not going to produce a file at the door that Christ has already settled.

And the sense of having got away with something is worth naming for what it is. It is the feeling a person gets when a debt has been paid by somebody else and their own hands are empty. It feels like escape because it was one. It just was not yours to arrange.

Why she has never said it out loud

Here is the last part, and it is about the silence rather than the fear.

It has gone unsaid for seventy nine years because of the role. The family has a role for you and you have filled it well, and there is a genuine cost to that which nobody has ever offered to share. Nothing written anywhere assigns that post to the oldest woman in a house, and the Spirit did not ask you to hold it.

But an unspoken fear does not stay the same size. It grows in the dark, and it recruits material, and by the time somebody is seventy nine it has had decades to add things to itself that a spoken fear would have lost years ago.

So say it. To one person. It does not have to be your daughter and it probably should not be the young minister.

You are allowed to be the one who is frightened. Nothing written anywhere makes an old woman the designated calm person, and the Spirit is not requiring you to hold a position for a family at your own expense.

And the young minister in the spring would almost certainly rather have heard the true sentence than the reassuring one. Ministers spend a great deal of their working lives being handed the version people think they want, and the ones worth having can tell, and they go home wishing somebody had trusted them with the other thing.