One Woman, One Household

Fifty years she has been the only one.

Her husband never came. He was not against it, he came at Christmas and once when their daughter was in the hospital, and he was a kind man and she misses him every day and he never came.

Their daughter went for a while in her twenties and stopped. The son never started. Between them there are six grandchildren, and of those six, one asked her something once, at seventeen, in a car, and then never brought it up again.

She is seventy-four now. She still goes. Second row from the back on the left, same place for thirty years.

And somewhere in the last few years she made a decision about herself that she has never said to another living person.

She decided that it did not take.

That is her phrase. Not that she failed exactly, and not that God failed, because she would not say that. Just that fifty years went by and the thing did not travel one inch past her own chair, and that a woman who could not carry it as far as her own kitchen table has to be honest with herself about what that means.

She has never said it out loud. She says it to herself, though, most weeks, usually on the way home.

Let me get in front of something before we go a step further. The burden for that is not yours and it never was. Nobody in this workspace, and nothing in that book, puts the eternity of six grandchildren on the shoulders of one woman in the second row from the back.

The first one in that whole region was one woman

Now, I want to show you a place in the account, and I want you to notice how small it is.

There is a city. First one in that whole region on that side of the water. And when they get there, there is nothing. No gathering, no building, no group waiting. They go down to a river on the Sabbath because they have heard there is a place of prayer, and there are some women there, and they sit down and talk to them.

Hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: one person is not a failed version of a household, and the record starts a whole region with one woman by a river. That is not an old woman's kindness talking, it is what stands written in the sixteenth chapter of Acts, and the same Holy Spirit who opened her heart that morning has had you in the second row from the back for thirty years.

Read it. It is four lines and then the account moves on.

One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul's message. When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home.Acts 16:14-15

One woman. Named, and then the account keeps going.

The Lord opened her heart. Not the speaker's argument, not her own reasoning. That clause is doing something and it is doing it on purpose: the opening of a heart is God's own work and the record says so plainly.

So take this now rather than after somebody in that family comes round: you are not a small failed version of a household, because the written word starts the whole thing on that continent with one woman at a riverside and gives her name, and the Spirit of God is the one who opens hearts and has never once handed that job to a grandmother.

And I will guard it, because I have seen this misused and it does real harm.

Nothing here says her household came in because she was good at it. The account does not tell us how any of that went, and it does not give her a method, and it certainly does not turn her into a technique.

What is written simply refuses to treat one person as a shortfall, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the opening, in His own time, in people who are not on anybody's schedule.