Nobody Wants An Old Woman Afternoon

You have more time than anybody you know.

Whole afternoons. Not busy ones. Afternoons with nothing in them at all, several a week, and you have had them for about six years now.

And you used to offer them.

Come round. Bring the little one. Come for the afternoon and stay as long as you like, there is nothing here that needs doing.

And people were lovely about it and often busy, and after a while you stopped offering, and you could not tell anybody the year you stopped because there was no year, it just thinned out.

And underneath the stopping there is a sentence you have never said to anybody.

Nobody wants an old woman's afternoon.

There is a line in Titus that gives older women a job, and the job cannot be done anywhere except in a room with somebody younger in it.

Teachers of good things

Here it is.

The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things. (Titus 2:3, King James Version)

The aged women likewise. Not in a footnote. Not as an afterthought. A group named directly and given a paragraph of their own.

And the last phrase is the assignment. Teachers of good things.

You have been given a job in a letter rather than left out of one, and Titus 2:3 names the aged women directly rather than mentioning them in passing. The Holy Spirit is the one who gave them a paragraph, and a paragraph is not what a person writes about somebody they have run out of uses for.

Now look at what that job requires, because the requirements are the whole point here.

Teachers of good things. Not writers of them. Not keepers of them. Teachers, which needs a second person, present, in a room, over time.

There is no version of that job that can be done alone in a house.

You have been assigned something that cannot be done without company, and it is written as teaching rather than as remembering. The Spirit of God is the one who set it up that way, and He set it up so that an older woman is required to be in rooms with people.

And what is being taught is worth noticing too.

Good things. Not doctrine and not a curriculum. The passage goes on to list the most ordinary domestic material there is, the sort of thing that only transfers by being around somebody.

You have been holding material that only moves in a room, and Scripture names good things rather than lessons. The Holy Spirit is the one who chose the vaguest possible word there, and the vagueness is because it is not a subject, it is a person.

An assumption that was never tested

Now let me go at the sentence underneath, because it has been running your last six years and it has never been examined once.

Nobody wants an old woman's afternoon.

Where did that come from. Not from anybody saying it. Nobody has ever said that to you and nobody ever would.

It came from a run of polite declines, spread over a couple of years, each one of which had a reason in it, and a mind that added them up and produced a conclusion nobody had offered.

You have a conclusion that nobody said out loud, and it is written that the aged women are teachers of good things rather than that anybody has finished with them. The Spirit of God is the one who shows a woman where a sentence actually came from, and this one came from arithmetic rather than from a person.

And here is what those declines were actually made of.

A young woman with small children who is asked whether she would like to come over is being asked a logistics question. Getting out of a house with those children is an operation, and the answer she gives is about the operation rather than about you.

That is nearly always what a decline is. Very few of them are about the person doing the offering and almost none of them are about an afternoon.

You have been reading operational answers as verdicts, and the written word puts the aged women in a room with younger ones as a matter of course. The Holy Spirit is the one who translates a decline correctly, and the correct translation is almost always about a Tuesday.

And here is the thing that the whole passage is built on and that nobody ever says to a woman your age.

You are short of nothing that room needs. Not one thing. There is no requirement in that verse about energy or usefulness or keeping up with anything.

You are fully equipped for the only job named there, and it is written as being teachers of good things rather than as being current. The Spirit of God is the one who assigned it knowing exactly how old the women were, and He assigned it anyway.

Offer one afternoon, with a day on it

So here is what to do, and the shape of the offer is everything.

Offer one specific afternoon to one specific person. With a day in it.

Not come round sometime. Not the standing welcome, which is beautiful and asks the other person to do all the work of choosing a moment.

Thursday afternoon, if that suits. That is the whole sentence and it does the thing that six years of general welcome could not do.

You are able to name a day, and Titus 2:3 gives a job that has to happen at an actual time rather than in principle. The Holy Spirit is the one who turns a standing invitation into a Thursday, and the Thursday is the difference.

And go to them if going is possible.

That is the second half and it removes the whole operation from their side. A young woman with small children does not have to get anybody out of a house if the afternoon arrives at hers.

You are able to take the afternoon to them, and it is written that the aged women teach rather than that they receive visitors. The Spirit of God is the one who moves an older woman toward a household, and toward is the direction the whole passage runs.

And do not offer to help.

This is the important one. Do not say you will do the ironing or watch the little one so she can get on. That turns the afternoon into a service and puts you straight back into being useful, which is a different article.

Offer the afternoon. Sit in it. Let her talk or not talk.

You are able to arrive with nothing to do, and His word assigns teaching good things rather than performing tasks. The Holy Spirit is the one who is in an afternoon with nothing in it, and there is more of Him in that one than in a helpful one.

And expect a decline the first time, or the second.

One decline is a Tuesday. Two declines are two Tuesdays. Neither of them is the sentence you have been carrying, and the only thing that would prove that sentence is not offering at all, which is what has been happening for six years.

You are able to be declined twice without it meaning anything, and it is written that the aged women are teachers of good things rather than that anybody guaranteed them an audience. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a woman offering past two declines, and the third one is usually a yes.