My Family Has Never Seen Me Alive

Her son said it in the hallway, at fifteen, on his way past, without any weight in it at all.

He said: you are always different at church.

And she said, different how? And he said, I dunno, like awake, and went upstairs.

She stood in that hallway for a while.

Because it is true. She knows exactly what he means and he is not wrong and he was not being unkind. In that building she is the most alive she has ever been in her life. She runs three things. People come to her. Something happens in that room when she is in it and she is not being proud when she says that, it is simply observable and everybody who goes there would tell you the same.

And she gets in the car at half past twelve and drives eleven minutes and walks into this house with absolutely nothing left in her hands.

So for fifteen years the people she loves most on this earth have been meeting a woman who is recovering.

They know her tired voice. They know the way she says, in a minute, love. They know the sound of her putting her bag down and not saying anything for about four minutes.

They have never once met the person her congregation thinks she is, and one of them has just noticed, on his way up the stairs, at fifteen years old.

You know that hallway.

Maybe you give your best hours to a job. Maybe it is a ministry, or a business, or a person outside the house who needs you. Maybe your family gets the four minutes of silence and everybody else gets the version with the lights on.

Nobody has done this to you. You did not decide it. It is what happens when a thing you are genuinely called to also happens to be enormous, and there are only so many hours in a Sunday.

The one house where somebody was told to stop

Here is a scene in a house, in the middle of a meal being prepared, and the woman in it is doing something good.

And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.Luke 10:41-42

Read what He does not say.

He does not say the serving was wrong. Somebody had to make that meal and He ate it. He does not tell her that hospitality is a lesser calling, and He does not tell her off for caring about the house.

He says her name twice, which is what you do when somebody is moving too fast to hear you the first time.

And then He says a sentence about what she is carrying: careful and troubled about many things. Not busy. Troubled. The problem He names is not her hands, it is her chest.

You are being spoken to by name, twice, by somebody who can see the difference between your hands and your chest. That is what Martha, Martha does in the sentence it opens (Luke 10:41), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the Comforter, the one who comes alongside, which is exactly the position of somebody who stops a person mid task rather than shouting instructions across a kitchen.

What is not being said here

I want to be direct, because a page like this can very quickly become a criticism of a woman who is already doing more than most people manage in a year.

Nothing here tells you to step back from the building. Nothing here says you are neglecting your family, or that you have your priorities wrong, or that a person in your position should reduce anything. That would be a stranger reading a headline and issuing a verdict on a life, and it would be worth exactly nothing.

Your work is real. What happens in that room when you are in it is real, and the people it happens to are real people with real lives that are different because you got up on Sunday.

You have not been failing your family, and the aliveness in that building is a genuine work rather than a misallocation. Scripture says as every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another (1 Peter 4:10), and it is the Holy Spirit who divided that gift to you severally as He willed, which means the size of what you carry is His arithmetic and not a mistake in your scheduling.

Where the actual gap is

Here is the thing your son noticed, and it is smaller and more fixable than a life audit.

He did not say you are never here. He said you are different at church.

He is not asking for more of your time. He is asking to meet the other one. The awake one. And the awake one has never once been at this table, because by the time you get to this table you are doing the necessary work of putting yourself back together.

You have a table in your own house and you have never sat at it awake. The word says one thing is needful (Luke 10:42), and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies what a person has run out of, which is why the sitting down is not a subtraction from the work but the thing the work has been running on.