Safe For Someone Who Keeps Moving

Sorcha has been making somebody safe for eleven years, and the person she has been making safe is not her.

It is her, technically. It is a version of her, some distance ahead, who is older and has more going on and is dealing with things Sorcha has not encountered yet. She has never described that woman out loud to anybody and she thinks about her almost every day.

The figure belongs to that woman. Not to Sorcha. Sorcha's own needs, the actual ones, this year, in this house, were met a good while ago and she knows it, and if the question were only about this year she would have stopped watching some time around her thirty-fifth birthday.

But the woman ahead keeps needing more.

That is what Sorcha noticed, sitting on a harbor wall in a coat, waiting for people to come back from somewhere. She noticed it as a small odd thought: I have been getting closer to her for eleven years and she has not got any nearer.

Because every year Sorcha arrives at a figure and looks up, and the woman ahead has moved, and she has moved by roughly the amount Sorcha has covered. She is not running away. She is not real enough to run. She simply lives one increment further on, which is where a projection always lives, and Sorcha has been walking toward a projection at exactly the speed the projection travels.

And here is the tender part, and this is why I am writing this at all.

That woman ahead is not a fantasy of luxury. She is not driving anything nice or living anywhere better. When Sorcha thinks about her, and she does, the woman ahead is mostly alone and mostly coping, and the reason she needs so much is that in Sorcha's imagination there is nobody there to help her.

That is what the figure is actually for.

It is not for a lifestyle. It is for a solitude that has not happened yet and that Sorcha has quietly assumed is coming.

You have your own version. There is somebody the safety is for, and it is not exactly you as you are now, and if you sit still and look at them you may find that what makes them expensive is not what they own but who is not standing next to them.

Nobody is calling you fearful. This is not a fear, exactly; it is closer to a very long, very patient act of care for somebody you have never met.

It is just that you have been provisioning for a person who does not exist yet, out of a story about the future that nobody has ever checked.

The word for portion is spoken by the soul to itself

There is a line in Lamentations, in the middle of the saddest book in the Bible, and the grammar of it is the whole point.

The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him.Lamentations 3:24

Saith my soul. He is not reporting a fact about God to the reader. He is quoting himself talking to himself, in a book written by a man who had watched a city fall and had nothing at all left to point at as evidence.

That is the setting. Not a comfortable man saying a comfortable thing. A man with the smoke still in his clothes, telling his own soul what it has, because his soul had stopped being able to tell him.

And portion is a land word. It is the measured, recorded share that a family was given, that could not be permanently lost, and that came back at the jubilee even if it had been signed away.

And now hear what is already true over you. You have a portion, and it is not a projection. That is not my encouragement: the written word calls Him the portion of my inheritance and of my cup, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a possession in a woman on a harbor wall rather than a phrase she has heard.

And you will not be alone there. That is the actual fear under the figure, so let it be answered plainly. The word says I will never leave thee nor forsake thee, and it is written with a double negative in the original that piles the promise up, and the Spirit is described as the one who is with you and shall be in you, which is the exact provision that no amount could ever have bought.

Nobody is coming for the figure

I want to be very plain, because this is where a message like this would tell you to stop preparing for your own old age, which would be a stupid thing to say and a cruel one.

Nobody here is telling you to reduce anything. Preparing for a future that may be harder is not faithlessness; it is ordinary love aimed forward, and half the people reading this are only comfortable now because somebody a generation ago did exactly that.

I am not going to name your figure, higher or lower. I do not know your health, your family, what is coming, and a woman naming somebody else's safe number from a page is meddling in a life she cannot see.

And nobody is telling you the woman ahead will be fine because everything works out. I am not going to promise you a future. That is not mine to give and anybody who hands it to you is selling something.

What is being said is narrower and I think truer: the figure has been sized by a story in which she is on her own, and that story has never once been examined, and it is not the story God tells about her.

And she is already accompanied. Not once she arrives: the word says lo, I am with you alway, and alway covers every year Sorcha has been imagining, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a felt companionship rather than a doctrine about the future.