The Crown Nobody Told Me I Was Wearing

Somebody counted, and it was not her, and it was not meant unkindly.

Her granddaughter, who is twenty seven and studies something to do with language, said it at the table on a Sunday, in the tone people use when they have noticed a pattern and think it is charming.

You apologize for your age about four times an hour.

And then she gave examples, because she is that sort of person and she was enjoying herself. Sorry, I am slow. Sorry, my hearing. You do not want to hear an old woman going on. I will not remember any of this by Thursday. Do not mind me.

The table laughed and it was warm and the moment passed.

She is eighty three. She has been doing it, she worked out later that evening, since she was about sixty six, and she cannot remember starting.

Here is what she has never once said out loud to anybody. She does not think of her age as a thing she has. She thinks of it as a thing she is imposing.

Every room she is in, she is aware of taking up a chair somebody younger might want. Every conversation, she is aware of being slower than the pace the others would go at. Every request for something to be repeated feels like a small tax she is charging the room, and so she pays it back in advance, four times an hour, with an apology.

Nobody has ever asked her to do that. Not one person in seventeen years.

The light in her front room in the late afternoon comes onto the piano and the photographs and the wall behind them, and she sat in it that evening after everybody had gone and did the counting herself.

There is one line in Proverbs about gray hair, and it uses a word that has never once entered her head in connection with herself.

The hoary head is a crown

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally promises. God has a flourish for your last years. You will surprise everybody. I am not going to say it. Nobody talking to a woman of eighty three about God has been authorized to forecast a late chapter, and a woman who is handed one will spend her remaining years waiting to become interesting.

Proverbs says: The hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of righteousness (Proverbs 16:31).

A crown of glory. Not a burden borne gracefully, not a condition to be managed, not something to be excused at the start of a sentence. A crown.

And notice the grammar. It is not: you may earn a crown. It is not: your age will become a crown if you are useful enough. It says the hoary head is a crown, present tense, as a statement about what the thing already is.

You have been wearing something you have spent seventeen years apologizing for. That is not me making the verse warmer than it is; Proverbs 16:31 uses the word crown about gray hair as a plain declarative, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line did not put an apology anywhere near it.

The conditional at the end is real and it is worth reading properly. If it be found in the way of righteousness. That is not a productivity clause and it is not about achievement; it is about the direction a life has been walking, which is a thing an eighty three year old has a great deal of evidence about and almost never counts.

The hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of righteousness.Proverbs 16:31

What the apology is actually doing

Now the mechanism, because four times an hour is a great deal and it is not politeness.

An apology is a small transaction and it moves something every time. Say sorry for taking up space and, after seventeen years, roughly a hundred thousand times, the room has agreed with you and so have you.

And here is the part her granddaughter did not see. It is not costing her dignity, or not mainly. It is costing her participation. A woman who opens every contribution with an apology has, by the fourth word, taught the room to hear whatever follows as optional.

You have never been an imposition in a room God put you in. Psalm 139:16 says His book had all your days written before there were any of them, and every one of those eighty three years was scheduled by somebody who is not economizing on chairs; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) did not put a woman in a room by mistake.

This is yours right now, in the light on that piano: a crown that is a fact rather than a compliment. Proverbs 16:31 states it about the thing itself; the Spirit who inspired that line did not make it depend on how quickly anybody moves.

Slower is not less

One plain thing about the pace, because she is right about the fact and wrong about the meaning.

She is slower. That is true and there is no point in a kind sentence that pretends otherwise. She takes longer, she asks for things again, and a conversation with four people in it does move at a rate that costs her.

And slower is not less. It is slower. There is not one verse in Scripture that grades a person by the speed at which they participate, and the assumption that there is came from somewhere else entirely.

You were never being scored on the speed. 1 Corinthians 12:22 says the members of the body which seem to be more feeble are necessary, and necessary is the word Paul chose; the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter put necessary and feeble in the same sentence deliberately.

Fruit is not output, and a front room on a Sunday is where it shows. Output is what a person contributes at the pace of the room. Fruit is what has grown on a woman across eighty three years of walking in one direction, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, quickly or slowly.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes while the light is still on that piano, tell Him one true thing with nothing asked for and no apology in front of it. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody times that.