She Calls Me By My Sister's Name

Merle has been called Yvette for about two and a half years.

Yvette is her sister. Yvette lives in Birmingham and comes down twice a year and is very good on the phone, and Merle does not say a word about any of that because it is not the point and she would not want it to be.

Merle is the one there. Mornings, evenings, the pharmacy, the laundry, the appointments, the night in April with the ambulance, all four years of it. And her mother, most days, when she looks up and her face does that thing where it brightens, says, "Yvette."

Merle says, "That is right, Mum."

She stopped correcting her in the first year. It upsets her and it changes nothing and there is no version of that conversation that ends well, so now she just answers to Yvette, and does the hair, and puts the radio on.

What she has never told anybody is what it does to her.

Not resentment about Yvette. Something smaller and stranger. It is that four years of this has produced a quiet, unarguable sense that she is doing all of it in a room where nobody knows she is there.

She has said one sentence about it out loud, once, to her friend Bev, in a car outside the pharmacy, and she said it in a light voice so it would not sound like what it was.

She said, "I am not sure any of it is landing."

And Bev, who is not a woman who says clever things, said, "Landing where, love?"

And Merle said, "Anywhere. In her. In heaven. Anywhere."

Now, the other part of this, and it is the part I want to get right.

Merle sings while she works. She has always done it, her mother did it, it is what women in that family do at a sink. Old choruses, mostly, the ones with no verses that everybody knows.

And in the July, in the middle of one, her mother's foot moved.

Not a lot. Twice, in time.

And Merle stood at that ironing board and could not carry on.

She is careful about that story. She will tell you plainly it was probably nothing, and that she is not going to build anything on a foot, and she is right to be careful.

But she has thought about it every day since.

The promise is spoken to the one who cannot hear it

There is a verse in Isaiah where God is talking about carrying, and it is worth noticing exactly who He addresses.

Even to your old age I will be the same, and even to your graying years I will bear you! I have done it, and I will carry you; and I will bear you and I will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

He is not speaking to the carer. He is speaking to the one being carried.

Even to your graying years. This is addressed to a person at the end of their strength, who is now dependent, and the whole verse is God insisting that the arrangement does not change when a person can no longer hold up their end of it.

I have done it, and I will carry you. Four verbs about carrying in one verse. He is being emphatic on purpose.

So hear this said over you, at the ironing board with the radio going. You are in a room where God is speaking to a woman who cannot hear it, and the fact that she cannot receive it has never once altered whether He is saying it. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who holds a person at a level far below the level of their own comprehension, which is a claim about Him rather than a guess about her.

And here is the thing Bev could not say and I can.

You are the only one in that room who can hear it. So you will have to hear it for both of you.

That is not a burden being added to you. It is a permission. You are allowed to receive a promise on behalf of a woman who cannot, and to say it out loud in a room where nobody will react, and that is not talking to yourself. That is what a family does when one of them cannot hold something.

Now let me be careful, because I will not do to you what other people have done.

Nothing here says God arranged the last four years to work something in you. Nothing here says there is a lesson you are supposed to be extracting from a woman's memory going. And I am not going to tell you what is or is not happening inside your mother, because I do not know, and neither does anybody who has told you confidently either way.

I am not going to build anything on the foot. You are right about that and your carefulness is a kind of integrity.

What I will say is the one thing this whole site stands on, and it applies here more sharply than almost anywhere.

Hidden is not gone.

The most decisive thing God ever did, He did in a place where there was nothing at all to see: no answer to the cry, no visible power, every observable fact pointing the same way. He was not absent. He was working, invisibly, at the exact moment it looked most like nothing.

Which means a room where nothing lands is not proof that nothing is landing.

And here is the second half of it, and it is the one that gets Merle through July.

Not one of those four years is unwitnessed.

The Word says God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love you have shown toward His name, and that includes hair brushed by a window, and a pharmacy queue, and the night in April, and two and a half years of answering to somebody else's name without correcting anybody. He has seen every one of them. Nothing has fallen through the floor of that house.

And the Spirit of God is the one who holds both of you at once: the woman doing the work, and the woman in the chair who cannot say who is doing it.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote to a friend caring for a parent who no longer knew him, and said that the love shown to a person who cannot return it is the closest thing on this earth to the way God loves us, because He began loving us long before we could say His name and did not wait for us to be able to.