The Only One Still Looking

The family stopped about four years ago and nobody announced it, which she thinks is the strangest part.

There was no decision. There was simply a Christmas where her name did not come up, and then another one, and then a conversation at a funeral where somebody said something in the past tense about her and nobody corrected it, and Mairi looked round the room and understood that she was on her own with this now.

Her sister has been gone seven years. Not dead; gone, in the way that happens when a person cuts a family off deliberately and thoroughly, and there was a reason, and the reason is complicated and not all of it belongs to her sister.

Mairi still writes at Christmas and on her birthday. She still keeps the same phone number, which is a decision she made in the second year and has never explained to anybody, in case. She still walks up this track on a Sunday afternoon because it is where she used to walk with her, and she prays up here, badly, in fragments, mostly the name.

And she is so tired.

Not tired of her sister. Tired of being the only one. There is a specific exhaustion that comes from carrying a thing alone that other people have quietly set down, and it is different from grief and it is heavier in some ways, because grief is at least shared.

She has never once said out loud that she resents them for stopping. She would not, because she understands why they did and some of them were more hurt than she was.

If you are the last one still looking, hear the question, and take it slowly, because it is going to change the size of what you are carrying. Which verse said the searching was yours?

God announces that He will do it Himself

The chapter is a rebuke to shepherds who did not look after the flock, and the scattered sheep have gone everywhere and nobody has gone after them. And then God speaks, and the tone changes entirely.

For thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out.Ezekiel 34:11

Behold, I, even I. The doubled pronoun is God insisting on being the subject. Read it out loud and it is almost stubborn: not the shepherds, not anybody else, I, even I.

Will both search my sheep, and seek them out. Two verbs for the same work, which is the way Hebrew emphasizes. He is not saying He will arrange a search. He is saying He will do it, personally, and He says it in a passage where the people who were supposed to do it have stopped.

That is Mairi's exact situation. Everybody who was supposed to be looking has stopped, and she has concluded that this leaves one person on the hill.

It leaves two.

You are not the only one looking, and it is already His search and not yours alone, and He announced it in a chapter about everybody else having stopped. I am not putting a warm reading on seven years of solitude. It is written in Ezekiel 34:11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a doubled pronoun onto a wet track on a Sunday afternoon.

The tiredness is about the aloneness, not the length

And here is the thing to be precise about, because Mairi is precise and vague comfort will not reach her.

Seven years of walking a track is not what has worn her out. She could do seven more; she is that kind of woman, and she comes from people who do not stop.

What has worn her out is the solitude of it, and specifically a belief that came with the solitude: that if she stops, the looking stops, because there is nobody else doing it.

That belief is the weight. Not the walking. And the verse takes precisely that belief away, because if the searching is God's own work, announced in the first person, then her sister is not being looked for by one tired woman on a hill in Argyll. She is being sought out by the one who says I, even I, and Mairi's Sunday afternoons are company rather than a solo operation with everything resting on them.

You are keeping company with a search rather than holding one up, and it is already being carried by somebody who does not get tired. Scripture says I will both search my sheep and seek them out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been out looking every week Mairi thought she was up here on her own.

What may be said about her sister and what may not

And now the honest limit, because this article will not do to Mairi what her aunt did at a prayer meeting in the third year.

Nobody can promise that her sister will come back. Not to the family, and not to God, and not on any timescale. Ezekiel 34 is God's declaration about His own posture and His own activity toward the scattered, and it is a real and enormous thing, and it is not a guarantee about one particular woman's return.

What can be said is this: the seeking is real, it is His, it is going on, and it did not begin when Mairi started walking and will not end if she stops.

That is smaller than a promise and it is far larger than what she has had for four years, which is a private conviction that everything depended on her.

You are not the load-bearing element in anybody's rescue, and it is already His seeking, and it will not end if you rest. It is written that He seeks them out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the seeking whether or not a tired woman gets up the hill on a Sunday.