Anna Was Eighty Four

He worked out the exact date at about half past four on a Tuesday, standing at his own window, and he has not told anybody because there is nobody left to tell who would know what he meant.

Fourteen months since his wife. Four years since the younger of his brothers. Nine since the elder.

He is eighty one and he is not ill, which he says to himself the way a man says a thing he does not entirely believe is good news.

The day has a shape. He gets up at half past six because that is when he has got up for sixty years. He goes out at ten, for the paper and to be seen by somebody. He is back by eleven. There is the afternoon, which is the part he does not describe to himself if he can avoid it. There is the news at six. He goes up at ten.

And what he noticed on Tuesday, standing at the window with the light going, is that somewhere in the last fourteen months every one of those things has stopped being what he does and started being how he passes the time until.

Until is the word. He would not finish that sentence out loud. He does not need to.

He is not depressed, and he would want that said. He eats. He rings his daughter on Sundays. He went to a lunch in September and enjoyed it and would go again.

He has simply, without any decision anywhere, moved himself from the category of people who live to the category of people who are waiting, and he has been in the second category for about eleven months, and until Tuesday he had not noticed that he had moved.

There is a woman in Luke who gets three verses and they are three of the strangest verses in the Christmas story.

She was of a great age and she did not depart

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally promises. God has something coming for you. There is a purpose for these years. I am not going to say it. Nobody talking to a man of eighty one about God has been authorized to forecast an event, and a promise of one would turn the afternoons into a vigil, which is what they already are.

Luke gives three verses to a woman called Anna. And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she was of a great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity; and she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day (Luke 2:36-37).

Read what is recorded about her. She had been a widow for a very long time. She was eighty four. And the verb that carries her whole life is departed not.

She did not go home. That is the whole of it. She was in the room, day and night, for decades, and Luke says so in the same breath as her age and her widowhood, as though the three facts belong together, which they do.

You are not required to have moved into the waiting category. That is not me overreading Luke; Luke 2:37 gives a woman of eighty four an active verb and puts her in the room, and the Holy Spirit who preserved those three verses did not describe her as passing the time.

And notice what happens next in the passage. She comes in at that instant, and gives thanks, and speaks about Him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem (Luke 2:38). At eighty four, in a room, with something to say, to people who were listening.

And she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day.Luke 2:37

The move he did not make

Now the thing that actually happened, because it was not a decision and it was not grief.

Nobody decides to become somebody waiting. It happens by accretion: a few months where getting through the day is the job, and then a few more where that is simply the shape, and then a year, and then a man is standing at a window at half past four working out dates.

And the reason it matters is not that waiting is shameful. It is that a man in the waiting category stops beginning things, and he stops without ever noticing, because there is no moment at which he says no.

You have never been reclassified by anybody with the authority to do it. Psalm 71:9 has an old man asking God not to cast him off in the time of old age, and the request is made to God rather than filed with a registry; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has not moved anybody's file.

This is yours right now, at a window at half past four: a place among the living and not among the waiting. Psalm 92:14 says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and still is doing all the work in that sentence; the Spirit who inspired that psalm put no end date on the bearing.

Fourteen months is not long

Let me say one plain thing about the fourteen months, because a man in his position will be quietly judging himself for how he is doing.

Fourteen months is not long. It is not long for a marriage of that length, and anybody who has told him otherwise, in any tone, was wrong. There is no schedule for this and nobody who has been through it would offer him one.

So this is not an article telling a man to buck up. He is doing better than he thinks and he has been doing it without his wife, which is a thing nobody has said to him.

You were never on a timetable for grief and nobody set one. Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, and it lists them all as times rather than as stages to complete; the Holy Spirit who inspired that chapter did not put a duration next to any of them.

Fruit is not output, and a widower's afternoon is where it shows. Output would be a project, an achievement, a thing to report to a daughter on a Sunday. Fruit is what grows on a man who is still getting up at half past six, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, in the first year of a widowhood the same as in the fortieth year of a marriage.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes before the news, tell Him one true thing about the afternoons with nothing asked for and nothing wanted. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody grades that.