If I Stopped, Would It Stop

She has never said it out loud. Not to her husband, not to a friend, not in a prayer where she used the actual words.

The nearest she has come was one evening about four years ago when she said something to her sister on the phone that was adjacent to it, and her sister said something reassuring and general, and she said, oh, I know, and changed the subject, and never went back.

The thought is: if I stopped, would it stop.

Not dramatically. She does not imagine anybody leaving. It is smaller and more plausible than that, and being plausible is what gives it its grip. She imagines a slow reduction. Fewer calls. The Sunday thing quietly not happening. A gradual and entirely unmalicious drift, in which people who love her love her slightly less often because there is less reason to come.

And it is not paranoid. That is the difficult part of this article. If you look at the traffic in and out of that house, a great deal of it does have a reason attached, and the reasons are mostly things she does. The food. The childcare on Wednesdays. The fact that she is the one who remembers everybody's dates. She is the switchboard, and switchboards get called.

She is sixty seven.

Here is the specific trap. She cannot test it, because testing it would require stopping, and stopping is exactly what she is afraid of doing, and any partial version of the test is contaminated because she would be watching. So she has carried an unresolved question for approximately thirty years and it will remain unresolved for the rest of her life unless something outside the system speaks.

That is the situation. It is airtight, and it is common, and almost nobody says it out loud.

You will have your own unasked question. The one about whether the affection would survive the usefulness, which cannot be tested and therefore keeps.

The love with a date problem

There is a sentence in Jeremiah that is spoken to a people in the middle of the worst thing that had happened to them, and it contains a word that makes it structurally unable to be conditional.

I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.Jeremiah 31:3

Everlasting. We hear that as a word about duration, meaning it goes on for a long time in the future, and that is half of it. The Hebrew reaches backwards as well. It means without beginning as much as without end.

And a love without a beginning cannot have been caused. Anything caused has a start, at the point where the cause operated. If there was no start, there was no cause, and if there was no cause, then nothing she did initiated it and nothing she stops doing can withdraw the reason for it.

So take it plainly: you are loved by something that did not begin, and that is what Jeremiah 31 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence spoken over people in exile and lays it down in a kitchen where a woman is the switchboard.

Which does something to the airtight trap, and I want to be careful about what.

It does not tell her what her children would do. I do not know and Scripture does not say and I am not going to furnish that room with my own guesses. What it does is answer the larger version of the same question, which she has been treating as one question and which is two. Underneath would they still come is is anything about me loved that I did not generate, and it is the second one that has kept her up, and the second one has an answer that does not require a test.

You have been loved by something you did not start and therefore cannot stop, because the written word calls the love everlasting in both directions, and His Spirit is what makes that reach the part of a woman that thirty years of being useful has been protecting.

And look at the second half of the verse, because Jeremiah puts the two clauses in an order that matters. Therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. The continuing is downstream of the loving. It is not a separate arrangement that has to be maintained; it is what the everlasting thing does over time, the way a river keeps arriving because of where it starts rather than because anybody is carrying buckets. Nobody in that sentence is topping anything up.

Which reaches the specific fear about a slow reduction, and reaches it from an angle she was not expecting. She has been imagining a supply that thins as the reason for it thins. Jeremiah describes a continuation that is caused by something behind it rather than fed from the front. You have been standing downstream of something rather than upstream of it, and Scripture is what puts the direction that way round rather than my reassurance, and His Spirit is the one who makes a direction feel different from a doctrine.

What the thirty years are not

Now the guardrail, in both directions again.

The thirty years of being the switchboard are not a buy, and nothing about the Wednesdays or the dates or the food has bought anybody's affection or God's. There is no account. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, always, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding one, they take it off and throw it down.

And they are not a manipulation, and they are not a mask, and this article is not going to reframe a lifetime of genuine love as a strategy. She feeds people because she loves them. That the feeding also holds a frightening question at bay is a second true thing, and second true things do not cancel first ones.

You have thirty years of real love that were never a payment, and Scripture is what holds both halves, and His Spirit is what stops the second half from erasing the first.

And nobody is setting her a test. You have nothing to prove by stopping and nothing to demonstrate by continuing, because the written word never asks anybody to establish love by withdrawal, and His Spirit is what keeps a truth from turning into an experiment a frightened woman has to run.