He Was Going Somewhere Too

She has stopped feeling guilty about it, and she is not entirely sure that is an improvement.

For years it was guilt. Somebody would mention something and she would feel the pull and then look honestly at the week and there would be nowhere for it to go, and she would feel bad, and the feeling bad was at least a kind of relationship to the thing.

Now it is just a fact about her. Filed. She is a person who cannot. Her work is what it is and her mother is where she is and the children are the ages they are, and she has arranged herself around all of it as tightly as a person can be arranged, and there is no give anywhere in the structure.

So when the subject comes up she does not even engage with it now. She thinks, quite calmly: not me, not this decade, maybe later, and she moves on and does not look back at it.

And she is aware that at some point in the last three or four years she stopped being somebody who wished she could and became somebody who has decided she is not.

If that is you, come and sit down on the grass for a minute. Nobody is going to ask you to restructure anything.

The one who stopped was on his way somewhere

Everybody knows this story, which is exactly why the detail I want gets past everybody.

A man is on a road, and three people come along it. Two pass by. The third stops.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him.Luke 10:33

As he journeyed. Four words, and they are usually read as scene setting.

They are not scene setting. They are the whole comparison. He was going somewhere. He had a destination and a reason and presumably a time he needed to be there by, and he was a foreigner on a dangerous road, which means he had more reason than most to keep moving.

Nobody in this story has a free afternoon. The two who pass by are not idle men. Read them again: they are professionals with duties, on the same road, going somewhere, and they had reasons, and the reasons were probably good ones.

The difference between them and him is not schedule. It is not temperament. It is not that one of them had margin. The text gives you no gap in his diary anywhere. It gives you a man who was on his way somewhere and who stopped, and then got back on the road afterward and carried on to wherever he had been going.

You are not disqualified by your schedule, and you never were, because the man in the story did not have one either. Luke 10:33 is where that sits, in four words about a journey that were never scene setting, and the same Spirit who kept them in the text is the one who lets a tightly arranged woman read it without bracing.

An interruption is not a reorganization

Now here is why the filing happened, and it is not laziness and it is not hardness of heart.

Every time she has considered it, she has considered it as a commitment. A thing that goes in the structure. And she is right that there is no room, and she is right that anything she added would have to come out of her mother or her children or the work that pays for both, and she has correctly concluded that it cannot be done.

But that is not what the story describes. There is no commitment in it anywhere. He does not adopt the man. He does not restructure his life around him. He stops, he does what is in front of him, he makes an arrangement at an inn and he leaves, and he continues his journey.

It is an interruption. It has a beginning and an end and then the road again.

And an interruption is available to a person with no margin, because it does not come out of the structure. It comes out of the gap between things, which everybody has, and which she has been protecting because she has been imagining a commitment.

You have room for an interruption, and it is already there, and it does not have to be taken from anybody. He promised it, in the words about a yoke that is easy and a burden that is light (Matthew 11:30), and His Spirit does not ask a woman to dismantle a house in order to be obedient.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before anything else, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. 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 before you go without anything 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 will not be one here.

And notice that the whole of what is being asked in this article can be done by somebody eating three meals today, on a Tuesday, in the eleven minutes between two other things. Nothing here requires anybody's body to do anything at all.

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

You are fully inside this, and you were never on its margin because of what your body needs. It is written into 2 Corinthians 8:12, where God receives according to what a person has, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a woman with no give anywhere in her week.

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.