She Comes Round At Five

Ada is seventy-four and Charlene comes round at five and Charlene brings a bag.

That is the arrangement and it has been the arrangement for going on four years, and there has never been one word spoken about the bag, because in that house a bag is a bag.

Here is what a Tuesday looks like now. From about half past three Ada starts listening for a car. She does not admit to herself that this is what she is doing; she calls it tidying, and there is very little to tidy in that house. At five, more or less, Charlene comes up the walk and lets herself in and says something about the weather or her son-in-law, and they sit in the front room until about nine.

And they talk. That is the thing nobody would understand from outside. They genuinely talk. About people they both knew fifty years ago, about a program they both watch, about Charlene's hip and Ada's neighbor and what the church has done with the flowers.

Ada is not lonely on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

She is lonely on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and she has never once said that sentence out loud to a living soul.

Her son rings on Sundays, and it is a good call, and it is eleven minutes.

She knows what is in the bag and she knows what it is doing to her and she is not a foolish woman. She knows her balance is not what it was and she knows why she is tired in the mornings now.

And here is the sentence she cannot get past, and nobody who has ever raised the subject with her has answered it:

If Charlene stops coming, what happens to five o'clock? Do not tell me to stop unless you can tell me what goes in that room instead.

And here is where I quit talking about Ada, because you have got your own five o'clock, and somebody who means well has already told you to stop, and nobody has ever addressed the room.

Let me say the first thing plain, the way a neighbor would. What is holding you is not the drink. It is a chair with somebody in it and four hours that are not silent. Anybody who talks to you about this without saying that first is not going to be any use to you.

Two are better than one, and God says so first

Let me put the true thing down first, because it is the thing you have never been allowed to say.

Your wanting company is not a weakness and it is not something to be talked out of. It is right, and God said it about people before He said anything about what they get up to:

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falls, for he has not another to help him up.Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

Sit with that middle sentence, because it is unusually blunt for Scripture. Woe to him that is alone when he falls. That is not a rebuke of the person alone. It is a lament over the situation. God looks at somebody with nobody to help them up and calls it woe.

So the ache you have on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays is not something to be repented of. It is a thing Scripture takes the side of. And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

And notice what the verse says company is for: the one will lift up his fellow. Company that lifts. That is the standard given, and it is worth holding your five o'clock up against it honestly, not to condemn anybody, but because you deserve to know what you are actually getting.

So your wanting is right, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own sympathy, and God's Spirit is not standing in that front room disapproving of a lonely woman for wanting somebody in a chair.

Nobody may take the room away without filling it

Now let me say the thing to everybody else, and then the thing to you.

To everybody else: nobody has the right to ask an old woman to give up her only company without putting something in its place. That is not ministry, it is arithmetic done by people who go home to full houses. If a person's whole week has one lit hour in it, and you take the hour, you have not helped, you have subtracted.

And now to you, plainly, because you are not a foolish woman and you would spot it if I softened this.

The room can be filled. Not by me and not by a sentence, and not this week. But it can, and it has to be, and the order matters: the company comes first and the change comes after, and if anybody has ever tried to run it the other way round with you it is no wonder it did not take.

Who else is there. That is the actual question and you have not been asked it in four years. There is a woman at that church who is on her own on a Wednesday. There is a neighbor. There is a phone that works in both directions, and your son does not know that eleven minutes on a Sunday is the whole of your week, because you have never told him.

Hear this: you are not owned by five o'clock, and you were not built to be alone at the hour you fall. God is the one who said so, plainly, and He said it before He said anything else about it. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can pick a phone up about this week rather than something you agree with on a porch.

And the plain half, said the way it should be. If you are drinking most days at seventy-four, please do not simply stop by yourself. Coming off alcohol without medical supervision can be genuinely dangerous, and it is more dangerous at your age, and that is not a reason to keep going, it is the reason to tell your own doctor plainly how much and how often. Tell them about the balance and the mornings too. And tell them about five o'clock, because a doctor who knows about the loneliness can do something about the loneliness, and one who only knows about the drinking cannot.