Draw Out Thy Soul

She stopped reading that kind of thing about four years ago and she never told anybody why.

It was not one article. It was all of them, and it was the tone underneath all of them, which assumes a person with a car and a spare room and something in the account at the end of the month. Take a meal round. Have somebody over. Give what you can.

She is seventy-four. Her pension is what it is. Her hip means the bus is a decision rather than a thing she does, and there is no spare room, and the last time she had something spare at the end of a month she could probably tell you the year.

So every time the subject comes up she does the same small internal move. She reads it as being addressed to somebody else, she agrees with it in principle, and she moves along.

And there is a grief under that which she has never described out loud, because it sounds self-pitying and she is not a self-pitying woman. It is the grief of having been sorted out of a category she used to be in. She used to be one of the people who did things for other people. That was most of her life. And now she is on the other list, the list of people who get checked on, and she has been on it long enough to know she is not coming off.

If you have been quietly reading yourself out of these pages, come and sit down by the window. This one is written to you.

Read what the verse actually asks you to draw out

Here is the verse, and everything turns on four words in the middle of it that almost every sermon skates over.

And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noonday.Isaiah 58:10

Draw out thy soul. Not thy purse. Not thy pantry. Not thy spare room or thy car or thy afternoon.

Now, the Hebrew behind it carries the ordinary sense of extending something, and plenty of translations reach for a loaf to make it concrete, and that is fair and the chapter certainly means food somewhere in it. But the word the prophet actually chose is the word for the self. The inner life. The part of a person that is you.

And it is worth asking why he chose it, in a chapter he could have written entirely in terms of bread.

Because the poorest person in that city still had one. A woman with nothing in the house could draw out her soul to somebody, and a rich man could send a whole cart round and never draw out anything at all, and Isaiah is describing the fast God chose rather than the fast God tolerated.

You have exactly what the verse names, and you have been holding it the entire four years. Isaiah 58:10 is where that sits, in a phrase that specifies the self rather than the supply, and the same Spirit who moved the prophet past the obvious word is the one who reads a woman back into a category she thinks she left.

What drawing out a soul actually costs, which is not nothing

Let me not make this sentimental, because a woman of seventy-four will smell that instantly and she deserves better.

Drawing out your soul is not a consolation prize handed to people who cannot afford the real thing. It is harder than the meal. Anybody can drop a dish and leave, and plenty do, and it is kind and it is real and it takes twenty minutes.

Sitting with somebody while they say the whole thing, the parts that repeat, the part they have said four times, the part they are ashamed of, without once reaching for a solution or looking at the clock, is expensive. It costs attention, which is the one thing almost nobody has and which she has more of now than she has ever had in her life.

That is not a coincidence and it is not a consolation. It is a redistribution. She has less of one currency and considerably more of another, and the verse names the one she has.

You are wealthy in the thing the chapter actually asks for, and you were made wealthy in it, not left with it. He promised it, in the description of a God who comforts us so that we are able to comfort others with the same comfort (2 Corinthians 1:4), and His Spirit does not measure a person's usefulness in what they can carry up a step.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before anything else, the thing that outranks all of it.

Some people must not go without food, and at seventy-four this is not a footnote. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor first and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is never going to be one here.

And read what God's own answer to a question about fasting turned out to be. A soul drawn out. A person sat with. Everything in Isaiah 58:10 can be done today by somebody eating three meals and taking every tablet the doctor prescribed, and that is not a workaround, it is the chapter.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your family is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is plain sense. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside all of it, and you were never at its edge because of your age or your hip. That is 2 Corinthians 8:12, not my kindness to you, and His Spirit has never once been given out according to what anybody is able for.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.