The First Time Somebody Called Me Ma'am

He was about nineteen and he was being polite.

That is the part that makes it stick. There was no unkindness anywhere in it. A boy behind a counter handed you your change and said thank you, ma'am, and went straight on to the next person, and the entire event took under a second and cost him no thought at all.

And you carried it around for a week.

In my grandmother's house there was a word for what people did with a small thing like that. She would say, you are keeping it warm. Meaning: it has stopped happening, and you are the one keeping it alive now.

I want to look at what that word actually did, because it did something and it is worth being precise about it.

It reclassified you. In one syllable, from a stranger, with no authority whatever, in a shop.

And here is what is strange. You accepted the reclassification instantly. You did not think, that boy calls everybody over thirty ma'am. You did not think, that is a regional habit and it means nothing. You took it as a finding, filed it, and adjusted something about how you saw yourself on the drive home.

A stranger with nineteen years on earth issued a ruling and it was accepted without appeal.

What one syllable can and cannot do

Let me put the two things side by side, because they get confused.

What the word did: it told you something about the boy. Specifically, that he was raised to be polite, or trained to be, and that he applies a respectful form to women who are not obviously his own age. That is all the information contained in the event.

What the word did not do: change anything at all about you. You walked into that shop and out of it as the same woman, with the same face, the same history, the same everything, and one second of somebody else's vocabulary happened in between.

You are the same woman on both sides of that counter, and a stranger's habit of speech has never once been able to reclassify a person. The Holy Spirit is what separates what happened from what a woman did with it, and Luke 2 has an old woman in a temple whose whole description is about presence rather than category.

Now the harder half, which is the keeping warm.

The event lasted a second. The week afterward was yours. And I do not say that as a criticism, because that is what everybody does with something that lands, and there is no woman alive who does not do it with something.

But it is worth knowing which part was done to you and which part you have been running, because only one of them is available to be changed.

You are carrying something that stopped happening a week ago, and no boy in any shop has ever once had the power to make it last that long. Scripture in Luke 2 gives an old woman a place, a task and a name, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a woman put down a second that ended.

She departed not from the temple

There is a woman in Luke's second chapter who is described with unusual care, and I have loved her since I was young.

And there was one Anna, a prophetess... she was of a great age... And she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. (Luke 2:36 and 37, King James Version)

Look at how she is introduced.

A prophetess. Of a great age. And then the sentence that carries her: she departed not from the temple.

Her age is stated plainly, twice, without apology and without softening. Eighty four. Of a great age. Luke does not put it delicately, because there is nothing there requiring delicacy.

And then he tells you what she does, and what she does is the whole point of the entry.

You are told about a woman whose age is stated and then set aside, and it has never once been the thing Scripture spends its words on. It is written in Luke 2 that Anna was of a great age and departed not from the temple, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a woman's attention from a category to a life.

And here is the part I would carry out of it.

Anna is the one who recognizes who the baby is. She is standing there, in the right place, at the right hour, after decades of being there, and she is the one who sees it and speaks about it to everybody looking for redemption.

Eighty four years is not the qualification being overcome in that story. It is the qualification.

You are somebody whose years are the reason for what you can see, and there has never once been a version of Anna where the years were the problem. The Spirit of God is what turns a woman's age from a category into a standing place, and the written word says she departed not from the temple, but served God night and day.

Letting one pass

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately passive.

The next time it happens, let it pass without adjusting anything.

Do not correct the person. Do not make a joke. Do not laugh in that particular way. Do not say anything at all about it to whoever is with you, and do not tell the story in the car.

Take the change, say thank you, and walk out of the shop.

You are able to take a word and walk out of a store with it, and nothing said across a counter has ever once required a ruling from you. Luke 2 says she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, and the Spirit of God is what lets a woman receive a word without deciding what it means about her.

The reason is the keeping warm. Every adjustment you make, including the joke, is a small act of tending toward the thing, and tending is what keeps something alive. A word that gets no response from you at all lasts one second, which is its natural length.

And afterward, go and do something warm for yourself that has nothing to do with any of it. Ten minutes of hands and warm water. That is the care, and it is not a consolation prize, and it is not connected to the shop.

You are able to let one second be one second, and no word has ever once had a life longer than the one you keep giving it. The written word in Luke 2 puts an old woman's age in the open and moves straight on, and the Holy Spirit is what makes ten warm minutes afterward into care rather than into comfort.