Fruit In Old Age Is An Actual Sentence

The common room gets the sun from eleven until about two, which is why the good chairs are where they are and why there is a quiet politics about them that nobody will admit to.

Windows open. A table of flowers because somebody's family brought too many. Cake, because it is somebody's birthday and it is always somebody's birthday.

She is seventy-six.

She was a district nurse for thirty-one years and then she looked after her husband for nine and then he died and then she came here, and that is the whole shape of it and she can say it in one breath.

And what she has settled into, without ever deciding, is a category she made up for herself. She is in the waiting part. Her useful years closed somewhere around the end of the nine, and what is happening now is a gap between then and the end, and the gap is being filled pleasantly by people who are kind and by cake on other people's birthdays.

She is not unhappy. That is the thing about it. She would tell you she is fine, and mean it.

But there is nothing in her that expects anything, and she has stopped noticing that there is nothing.

If you have put yourself in the waiting part, you know it was not a decision, and you know you would not be able to say when it happened.

The psalm has a verb for old age and it is not waiting

The weight first and at its own size, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the room, which is warm and gets the sun. It is expectation. It costs you the ordinary human posture of leaning slightly forward into your own days, which you had for sixty-eight years and have not had for eight. It costs the thirty-one years and the nine, which are behind a line now and which you can say in one breath. It costs you the noticing, because a person who has stopped expecting also stops noticing that they have. And it costs you a category you invented and never examined.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the waiting part has become somewhere darker, if you have found yourself wanting it to be sooner, tell one living person today. The nurse on this afternoon, your doctor, your daughter, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who bring too many flowers and stay for the cake.

Now, Psalm 92, and read the verb in the sentence about old age.

Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.Psalm 92:13-14

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age.

Bring forth. That is an active verb, and the psalm attaches it, deliberately and by name, to old age. It is not a sentence about being kept comfortable, or about being cared for pleasantly, or about waiting well, all of which are good and none of which is what it says.

And notice the word still. The psalmist puts it in on purpose, because he knows exactly what everybody assumes about the last stretch, and he is contradicting it in one syllable.

You are named in a sentence that puts an active verb on your part of life. Psalm 92:14 says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old song and lays it on a common room that gets the sun from eleven.

Now, where the fruit comes from, because that is the part that matters when the district nursing is over. The verse before names the location: planted in the house of the LORD. The fruit in that psalm is not the output of a career. It is what happens to something that is planted somewhere, and what is planted is a person, and the place is God's own house.

You have been planted somewhere rather than employed, and planted things do not have a last useful year. That is written into Psalm 92:13, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes an agricultural sentence land on a woman in a good chair.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because eight years of kind sentences have already been said in that room.

It does not tell you what the fruit is, and it does not promise you a project or a purpose you can point at, and I am not going to invent one for you, because the whole trouble on this subject is people handing an old woman a job so she will feel better.

And it makes no promise about your body or your years, and I will not predict them, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it is not a trade. Nothing here says the losing was worth it or that the fruit is compensation for the thirty-one years being over. It is additional. It is what is true of a planted thing, at the same time as everything else that is true.

You were never a career that ended; you were a thing that was planted. Scripture puts an active verb on old age by name, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries that into a room with the windows open.