What to Bring and How Long to Stay

The young woman is thirty and she rang at eight in the morning, which tells you how frightened she was.

Somebody at their church had lost a husband in the night. The young woman is on the pastoral team, which is a new thing at that church and she is new to it, and she had been given the address and no other instruction whatsoever.

She said, and she was nearly crying: I do not know what to take. And then: I do not know how long to stay.

The old woman is eighty. She has been walking into houses like that since she was thirty four. She could tell you which meals actually get eaten, which is not the ones people bring, and why you never ring the doorbell twice.

And standing in her kitchen with the phone against her shoulder she had a thought that has been sitting with her since, which is that she has known all of this for forty six years and has never once written any of it down or told it to anybody.

Not because she was keeping it. Because nobody asked, and because none of it feels like knowledge. It feels like the way you do a thing.

She is eighty. There are perhaps four other women in that congregation who know this and all four of them are older than she is.

Sit down at the table with the phone still in your hand. There is a verse about older women teaching younger ones and it is more practical than people think.

Older women are to teach

Here it is, and it is startlingly ordinary in what it asks for.

Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women.Titus 2:3

Teach what is good, and train. Those are working words. Train is what you do with somebody who is going to have to do a thing, and it implies specifics rather than encouragement.

And notice that it is stated as an instruction rather than as an option. It is not describing a gift some older women have. It is describing a job that belongs to them because of what they have been through and how long they have been doing it.

You have something you are supposed to hand over. Titus 2:3 makes teaching the younger women a task rather than a temperament, and the Spirit inspired it as a plain instruction to people your age.

Forty six years of knowing which meals get eaten is exactly the sort of thing that verse means. It is not lesser knowledge because it is practical.

What she actually asked

Now the two questions, because they are better questions than they sound.

What to take. The answer is almost never a casserole in the first two days, because there will be nine and they will freeze eight and feel guilty about it. Take milk, bread, and something that can be eaten standing up at eleven at night by somebody who has not eaten all day. Take a bag of ice if it is summer, because nobody thinks of it and the house will be full of people.

How long to stay. Longer than feels natural and less than you think you should. Somewhere near an hour on a first visit, and then leave before they have to work out how to end it, and come back in three weeks when everybody else has stopped.

Those two answers are worth more than anything anybody will say in that house, and they took forty six years to learn, and they can be transmitted in about ninety seconds.

That gap between how long it takes to learn a thing and how long it takes to say it is the entire argument for handing things on. A woman of thirty cannot acquire forty six years. She can acquire the ninety seconds, today, on a telephone, and then walk into a house this afternoon with two of the four things she needs already in her hands.

You are holding something transmissible. Nothing written anywhere made this the sort of wisdom a person has to earn from scratch, and the Spirit put an instruction about training in a letter precisely so that it would not have to be.

And the part that is harder to teach

Here is the piece that will take more than a phone call.

When to stop talking. That is the real content and it is not a rule, it is a read, and it takes years and cannot be handed over in a sentence.

But it can be handed over by being watched. Take her with you. Not to talk. Let her sit in the room while you do it, twice, three times, and she will learn more in those hours than from anything you could say on a phone.

That is what training means in that verse, and it is why the word is not teaching. Teaching is a phone call. Training is a car journey and an hour on somebody's sofa and a conversation afterward about what she noticed.

You are permitted to spend your last years doing this. What is written puts it on older women as a job, and the Spirit is not asking anybody of eighty to do it alone or to invent a course.

And write some of it down. Not a book. Two sides of paper about what to take and when to leave, for four women who will be doing this after you.

And do it badly and soon rather than properly and later, because two sides of rough notes in a drawer are worth more than a good document that never gets written. Nothing written anywhere asked for it to be polished, and the Spirit works through the version that actually exists.