A Bed She Has Not Slept In

Fourteen months on the couch, and the bed upstairs is made every day and nobody sleeps in it.

The girl has it now, because the girl needs a door that shuts. The boy is in the small room. And she is on the couch with a folded quilt and the hall light on low, and she has stopped calling it temporary out loud, because saying temporary out loud started to feel like a lie she was telling a child.

At the parent teacher conference in October a young woman with a clipboard leaned across the table and said, with real feeling, that she was doing a wonderful job and that the children were lucky. She said thank you. She drove home. She made two lunches for the morning, and then she sat on the edge of the couch with her coat still on for about ten minutes, which is the closest thing to a rest she has had since spring.

Now, here is what she could not have said back across that table. She is not doing a wonderful job. She is doing what is in front of her, badly on some days, and the reason there are lunches in the fridge is not a quality of hers that anybody has correctly named.

Sixty three years old. Two children in the house. No bed.

You have your own version of this. Maybe not a couch. But there is something ordinary you gave up so long ago that you have stopped counting it as a loss, and people who mean well keep congratulating you on the part that still works.

The cost, plainly, before anybody says wonderful

The clipboard did not count it. So we will.

It cost her back, which is worse in the mornings now. It cost the friendships that ran on being able to say yes to a Tuesday. It cost the quiet she used to have between nine and eleven, which is where she used to pray and now is where she folds. And it cost her a room. Not a big thing, a room. But a person needs one door in the world that is theirs, and she gave hers away in the second week and nobody has ever mentioned it since.

You have been paying in things nobody itemizes, and God has never sent you a bill for what you gave up. Psalm 68:5 calls Him a father of the fatherless and a judge of the widows in His holy habitation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old title like that and makes it a hand on the shoulder of a woman sitting on a couch with her coat still on. He was not out at the school admiring the lunches. He was on the couch.

The pavilion is a room, and it is His

There is one line built for a woman with no room of her own.

For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock.Psalm 27:5

Read what she is given. Not strength for the couch. A room. Hide me in His pavilion, in the secret of His tent. A pavilion is somewhere you go inside, and a secret is by definition something the school hall cannot see, and it is His Spirit who makes an ancient tent into a place a woman in this century can actually go and sit down.

You have a room in the middle of a house where you gave your room away, and it was given to you rather than earned. That is not me being tender about a hard situation. The written word puts the hiding and the setting up on a rock in one breath and hands the whole action to Him, and the Spirit is the one keeping a woman upright through fourteen months her own reserves ran out in. Nobody at that conference thanked the right one. Nobody at a table can see a tent.

And this has to be said plainly or the whole thing turns cruel. What happened to those children is not a display. It was not arranged so a school could learn something from watching a grandmother cope. God did not empty their house to make a point with a clipboard. She is not an exhibit and neither are they.

Two things a woman on a couch has to hear

The first is that God still shelters people. Not sheltered, poetically, in an older world. Shelters, present tense, tonight, in that front room. If the pavilion is only a lovely old image, then this is just unusually good coping, October was right, and there is nowhere at all to take fourteen months.

The second is that this shelter is over her, now, with the hall light on low. Not over grandmothers with more help. Not over women who still have a bed.

You have a shelter that was given to you rather than earned by you, and it does not fold up on the nights your back is worse. Psalm 91:4 says He covers you with His feathers and under His wings you take refuge, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes covered a thing a sixty three year old body can feel rather than a thing a mind agrees to.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the tiredness has stopped being tiredness and started being something heavier, if there are hours when carrying on is genuinely in question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line first, before anybody else. That is not the shelter failing. That is the shelter arriving with a face and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than giving up.