Two of the Four Want Nothing

She keeps it in her head as a fraction, which is a terrible way to hold four people, and she knows that, and she does it anyway.

Four grandchildren. The oldest one and the youngest one are, in her private accounting, in. The two in the middle are out, and have been for years, and the one who is twenty four told her so directly at a table last spring, kindly, in the way that young people are kind now, which is to say without any softening at all.

She is seventy eight.

At forty, in a kitchen, on a day when nothing in particular was happening, she told God that her line would serve Him. Not her children specifically and not her grandchildren specifically, because there were none then. Her line. She had a picture of it going forward like a road.

And this is what she does now, at the sink, and she has never told a living soul: she totals it.

Two out of four. Then, some days, she adjusts it, because the twenty four year old was not always like that and the oldest one might not stay, and the arithmetic moves and she moves with it, and on a bad Tuesday it is one out of four, and on a bad Tuesday she counts herself a failure at the one thing she asked for.

You may be totaling a family. And you may know exactly how grotesque it is to hold people as a fraction, and be entirely unable to stop.

The covenant as He states it

Now let me put a verse in front of you that you may never have been shown, because it is at the end of a difficult chapter and nobody preaches it.

God is speaking, and He is stating the terms of a covenant, and He states them in a very particular order.

As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the LORD; My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the LORD, from henceforth and for ever.Isaiah 59:21

You are held inside a covenant whose keeping God states in the first person and never expresses as a proportion. Isaiah 59:21 says my spirit and my words and shall not depart across three generations, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that and not your arithmetic.

As for me

He opens with As for me, which is the language of somebody taking a side of a page. He is stating what is His, and everything that follows is on that side.

My spirit that is upon thee. My words which I have put in thy mouth. Both possessives are His. The Spirit is His and He put it there; the words are His and He put them in.

And then the promise: shall not depart. Not out of your mouth, not out of your seed's, not out of your seed's seed. Three generations, and the verb is a negative, and it is a verb about what does not happen rather than a description of what everybody in those generations will feel or attend or believe.

Notice what is not there. There is no percentage in that verse. There is no list of who took it up. It is a statement about the durability of what He put, and it is made in the first person by the one doing the putting.

You are held inside a covenant whose keeping is stated by God in the first person and never expressed as a proportion. Isaiah 59:21 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of the end of a hard chapter and stands it at a kitchen sink.

And here is the hard rule, because this is the landing category and it does not bend: nothing here is exercised over anybody's will, and that includes a twenty four year old who was kind about it at a table.

Those are four separate people with four separate lives who are entitled to answer for themselves and will. There is no lever. If there were one, God has declined to use it, and no grandmother is going to be handed one here.

You are released from the totaling, and you were never issued a scoreboard. Scripture states the covenant in the first person and reports no percentages at all, and the Spirit of God has been in that family for three generations without publishing a figure.

What a fraction cannot hold

And now something about the arithmetic, because you already know it is wrong and knowing has not stopped you.

A fraction requires a fixed denominator and a settled numerator. Both of yours move. That is not a defect in your counting; it is evidence that the thing you are trying to count cannot be counted, because these are not units, they are four people who are thirty and twenty seven and twenty four and nineteen and are not finished.

Your own mother, if you are honest about it, would have counted you out at twenty four. You have told that story yourself.

You are holding living people in a form that cannot hold them. That is exactly why the covenant in Isaiah 59 is stated as a durability rather than as a proportion, and His Spirit has been the one carrying all four of those names while you stood at a sink adjusting a figure.