No Door Out That Is Not A Betrayal

Verna knows the sound the recliner makes before Dale is properly awake, and she is up out of her own chair before the sound finishes.

The two armchairs used to face the window. They faced the window for thirty eight years, side by side, so you could see who was coming up the drive. After the stroke the men came and took his out and brought the recliner in, and now the chairs face each other, because that is how you can see somebody's hands.

It is about four in the afternoon in the front room. The light is coming in low and gold along the rug the way it does in March, and it lands on the folded blanket and the side table with the pill organizer on it, the one with the little doors that say the days.

He says her name. She says, I am right here.

Seventy years old and she is quick on her feet in this room, quicker than she is anywhere else, because this room she knows in the dark. She knows the two floorboards. She knows how long the kettle takes. She knows which side to stand on.

What she does not know is what to do with the thing that came into her chest around Christmas and has not moved out.

It is not resentment. She has looked at it and looked at it and it is not that. She loves him the way you love somebody you have shared a bathroom with since Eisenhower.

It is that she cannot find the door.

Every way out of this that she has thought of is a betrayal. The place in town is a betrayal. Her sister saying come and stay a week is a betrayal. Even the thought of it, at half past three in the morning with the radio on low, is a betrayal, and she puts it away and is ashamed of having taken it out.

So there is no door. And a room with no door in it gets heavy after a while, and this one has.

Nobody knows. She is fine at the pharmacy. She is fine at church, where a woman she has known forty years told her in the vestibule that she was a real light in this congregation, and Verna said thank you and thought, you have no idea what is in me at three in the morning.

Dale's hand comes up off the arm of the recliner, not for anything, just the way it does now. She takes it and holds it and looks out at the drive where the chairs used to face.

The light on the rug moves along an inch and finds the edge of the blanket.

Read where Job puts the candle

There is a chapter in Job where he sits in the worst of it and remembers the good years out loud, and in the middle of the remembering he says a thing about light that almost nobody notices.

When his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness.Job 29:3

Read the second half of that twice. By his light I walked through darkness.

Not around it. Not out of it. Through it. The candle in that verse does not remove the dark from the road and it never claimed to. What it does is stay on his head while he goes through, which is a completely different promise from the one you were probably taught to expect.

And look where he puts it. On the head. Not held out in front of him, where he would have to keep it steady and keep it up and keep it from going out. On the head, where it goes where he goes and he does not have to carry it with his hands, and his hands stay free for whatever the road needs them for.

You are walking through and not sitting in the dark, and the difference is the candle, not your grip on it. Job 29:3 wrote the mechanism down long before anybody thought to comfort you with it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walks a written line like that into a front room at four in the afternoon.

Now, one plain thing before we go on, and I am saying it warmly and only once. If what is happening in that house has stopped being heavy and started being dangerous, for him or for you, please tell somebody today who can actually help. A doctor, a nurse, a social worker, your own family. Staying is not the holy option when it is not safe, and asking for help would not put your light out. It never has.

The heaviness is not a verdict on you

Here is what the heaviness has been telling you, in that voice it uses at three in the morning. It has been telling you that a woman with a real light in her would not feel this.

It is a lie, and it is a lie with good manners, which is the hardest kind to catch.

Look again at who is speaking in Job 29. That is a man on an ash heap describing the candle. He is not describing it from a good season. He is not saying he felt luminous. He is saying that is how the walking got done.

The feeling of being lit and the fact of being lit came apart a long time ago in your house, and you assumed the fact went with the feeling. It did not. They were never fastened together.

You have His candle on your head at three in the morning with the radio on low, exactly as much as you had it at the wedding. That is in Scripture and not in my sympathy for you, and His Spirit is content to keep saying it over a woman in a room where the chairs stopped facing the window.

And the door. Let me say this carefully, because you have been holding it alone a long time.

Wanting a door is not the same as taking one. A tired woman looking for a door at half past three is not a woman planning a betrayal. She is a woman whose body has done a long day and is doing the arithmetic that bodies do. There is no disloyalty in the arithmetic. You have not done anything.

You were not asked to stop wanting rest, and you were never told that wanting it makes you a traitor. The written word is full of tired people saying so out loud, and the Spirit who recorded them is not embarrassed by you saying it in your own front room.