Not Needing Anything Was Learned

The boy at the store put your bags in the cart and asked whether he could carry them out for you, and you said no thank you the way you always say it, before he had finished the sentence.

You are seventy-one years old and you have never in your life asked a soul for anything. People say that about you at church the way you say a compliment, and you have always taken it as one, because it is one. Around here it is the highest one there is.

You fixed the porch step yourself in June. Got the lumber into the car on your own, cut it in the yard, put it in. It is not a good step. It sits a little proud on the left side and it will want doing again. But it is yours and nobody had to come out for it.

You keep the second freezer full for the same reason. Never borrow. Never be the one somebody has to do something about. If it is in the freezer then you never have to knock on a door and find out what a face does when it opens and it is you standing there wanting something.

Tonight you are at the kitchen table with the church directory, the little stapled one they print up every fall, because you were after a phone number for somebody else's business.

And sitting there you notice that you have had one of these every year for thirty-one years.

And you have never once called a number in one of them. Not when the pipe froze. Not the winter you could not get the car up the lane. Not that night in March.

You sit with that a while, and it does not go anywhere good.

Because under it, way down, older than any of this, there is a thing you have never let yourself finish thinking. It starts with a set of steps you sat on when you were small. It has to do with how long you sat there, and how you got up eventually, and went in, and never asked anybody for anything again.

You put the directory back in the drawer.

Not because it is not true.

Because it is.

Not Needing Anything Is A Skill, And Skills Get Taught

First thing, and let it be flat and plain: nobody here is going to ask you to tell it.

There is no version of this page where a person has to lay out what a house was like in order to be taken seriously, and nowhere in it will you get asked why nobody came. That question has never once had a good answer, and asking it has only ever cost people like you more than it gave back.

So here is the whole page in one line. You were taught not to need. It is a skill rather than a temperament, and skills get taught, and this one got taught early, by an absence, and Psalm 68:5 puts God in the position of Father to the fatherless as a matter of what He is rather than a favor He grants, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walked you over to that drawer tonight.

Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.Psalm 68:5

Look at what kind of sentence that is. It is not a promise about future arrangements and it is not a job He takes on when somebody applies for it. It is a title. It sits in that verse the same way protector sits there, as a description of what He is in His own house, and titles do not switch on and off according to who is watching.

You have been fathered the whole way along, and that is not a figure of speech and it is not a consolation prize handed out for a hard start. It is written into the name He goes by, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been keeping that name over you for seventy-one years while you carried your own lumber.

Now, I will not say one word against the skill. It worked. A child who learns not to need is not being difficult. She is doing the only arithmetic available to her with the numbers she was handed, and she is right, and the not-needing is a good part of what got a woman to seventy-one with a full freezer and a step she cut herself. That is competence built straight on top of an injury, and the competence is real and nobody is taking it off you.

But it was taught, and a thing that was taught is not the same thing as who a person is. That is the whole difference this page is about. A personality is something you are. An injury is something that happened to you, and it can be named, and named is most of the way to laid down. Scripture is full of people whose habits came off their history, and the Spirit of God has never treated a scar as a character trait.

And a plain word here, because this is the page where it matters most. If sitting with any of this brings thoughts of ending your life, or of just not being here, then that gets said out loud tonight to one living human being. A doctor, a pastor, somebody whose number is in that directory in the drawer. In the United States, 988 answers a call or a text at any hour. Anywhere else, emergency services or a local crisis line will take it. That is not a failure of faith and it does not make anybody a burden. God put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and calling one of them is obedience, not defeat. And for a woman who was taught never to ask, dialing a number is not weakness. It is the bravest piece of arithmetic she has ever done.

Now the thing I actually came to say, and it is not about the house and it is not about anybody who was in it. The call was heard. Psalm 34:17 says the cry gets through and the Lord hears, and you were heard on those steps, at the time, at the age you were, in the words you had then, and the Spirit who carried that cry has not set it down since. Nothing about the room it went into was ever a report on whether it reached Him.

So what gets handed over now is not a project of learning to be needy, and it is not a list. You have been given the Spirit of adoption, and Romans 8:15 says the Spirit you received is not a spirit of slavery pulling you back into fear but the Spirit by whom we cry out Father. Read that again slowly. The crying out is the evidence of the adoption. It was never the failure of it.