Their Houses Are Full Of Things I Do Not Know

You sat in their front room and could not name four things in it.

Not because you were not paying attention. Because the objects have moved on. Whole categories of thing exist now that did not exist when you were furnishing anything, and they are not explained to anybody, and everybody younger absorbed them without a lesson.

And they were kind about it. Not one of them made you feel foolish. But you sat there on the edge of a sofa in a room where boxes were still half unpacked and understood something about yourself that you have not said to anybody.

You have nothing to give these people. Not because you would not. Because you cannot see the shape of their lives well enough to aim at it.

And so you give what everybody gives, which is nothing much, and you feel every year that you are becoming a person who gets sent a card.

There is a proverb about two faculties, and it is one sentence long and it settles this.

The hearing ear and the seeing eye

Here it is.

The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them. (Proverbs 20:12, King James Version)

Two faculties, named side by side, and both attributed directly to God.

Notice what is not in the sentence. There is no mention of what the eye is looking at. No mention of the era, the furniture, the vocabulary or the technology. The faculty is named and its maker is named and nothing about the contents of the room enters into it.

You have been declared obsolete by the contents of a room, and Proverbs 20:12 attributes the hearing and the seeing to God rather than to familiarity with what is in front of them. The Holy Spirit is the one who left the contents out of that verse, and the leaving out is the whole comfort.

Now the phrase at the end, which is doing more work than it looks.

The LORD hath made even both of them. Even both. The proverb goes out of its way to say that neither one is a lesser gift, and that both come from the same hand.

That is a statement about equipment, and equipment does not expire when the room is redecorated.

You are still carrying what you were given, and it is written that the LORD made even both of them rather than that He issued them for one particular decade. The Spirit of God is the one who made those two things in you, and He has not withdrawn either one.

And here is the practical implication, which is where the relief is.

The eye that cannot name the objects in that room is the same eye that can see the woman on the floor deciding whether to say something. The ear that has no vocabulary for what they do all day is the same ear that hears a young man go slightly flat when a particular subject comes up.

You have been using the wrong measure of your own usefulness, and His word names the faculty rather than its subject matter. The Holy Spirit is the one who redirects an ear that is being aimed at the furniture, and He redirects it toward the people.

The objects changed and the people did not

Now let me say the thing that will free you fastest, and it is a plain observation about human beings.

Everything you know about people is still current.

A young woman worrying whether she is doing it right. A young man who cannot say the true sentence to his wife. Somebody exhausted and pretending they are not. Somebody who has stopped being asked about the thing they actually care about.

None of that has been updated in three thousand years. You have seen every one of those a hundred times and you can spot them across a room in about forty seconds.

You are fluent in the only language in that house that matters, and it is written that the hearing ear and the seeing eye were both made by God rather than by a generation. The Spirit of God is the one who taught you to read people over sixty years, and none of that education has expired.

And here is what those young people are actually short of.

Not another object. That room is full of objects, half of them still in boxes, and more arriving.

They are short of somebody older who sees them. There is almost nobody in a young household who has any distance on it, and distance is the one thing you have in quantity and cannot get rid of.

You have the one thing that room does not contain, and Scripture puts the seeing eye in the hands of God rather than in the hands of the young. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an older woman's attention land as safety, and it is rarer in a young house than anything on any shelf.

And I want to say the plain thing about the card.

You have not been becoming a person who sends a card. You have been withdrawing, gradually and reasonably, from rooms you decided you could not read, and the card is the last thread of a retreat that started years ago.

You are not fading out of anything, and it is written that both faculties were made by God rather than lent out for a season. The Spirit of God is the one who stops a retreat, and He stops it by telling a woman what she can still do.

Say the thing you noticed

So here is what to do, and it does not require you to learn one single thing about any object.

Next time you sit in one of those rooms, watch the people rather than the room.

You will see something within about half an hour. You always do. Something about how one of them is carrying the week, or what one of them is not saying, or the moment somebody's face changed.

You are able to see it inside half an hour, and Proverbs 20:12 gives the seeing eye as something God made rather than something a room grants. The Holy Spirit is the one who sharpens what an older woman notices, and He sharpens it in rooms she does not recognize just as well as in ones she does.

And then, before you leave, say it out loud to that person. Once, quietly, at the door.

You have been doing a great deal this year. Or: you looked tired when he said that, and I do not think anybody else saw. Or: you are better at this than you think you are.

You have one sentence that will stay with somebody for years, and it is written that the LORD made even both of them rather than that the young make their own. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a sentence at a door outlast everything else in a room, and He has been doing that through older women for a very long time.

And then let whatever you give come out of that.

It might be a thing and it might be a visit and it might be one sentence written down and handed over. The form has never been the subject here. What matters is that it comes out of something you saw rather than out of a guess at what a young household lacks.

You are giving out of what you noticed the moment you stop guessing at the furniture, and the written word names two faculties and no vocabulary whatever. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes noticing arrive as love, and there is nothing in any of those boxes that does that.