How I Got To The Window Every Day

Eight feet. That was the whole distance, and she made it every day, and she has never understood how.

The bed to the window seat. About eight feet across a bedroom floor with a rug on it. And in the months when the words had gone, when the world had got too loud and she had gone entirely quiet and her family had stopped asking her questions because questions were unbearable, she got up at some point in every one of those days and went and sat in the window.

She could not have told you why. There was no plan in it. She was not doing therapy or fresh air or a technique. She simply ended up there, most afternoons, with her knees up, watching a road.

Her mother said something about it last Christmas that she has been carrying around ever since. She said, you always got to that window, and I used to stand outside your door and hear the floorboard and I would go downstairs and be able to breathe for the rest of the day.

She had no idea. That is the thing. Eight feet was not a decision and it was not courage and it was not for anybody. And it turns out it was the load bearing thing in her mother's whole year.

You have eight feet somewhere. Some small motion you made, over and over, in a stretch you barely remember, that you have never counted as anything.

Name what those months took first

Nobody counted this, and it should be counted.

They took her voice, which came back but not all the way and not to everybody. They took a year of a degree. They took her ability to be in a room where two conversations are happening at once, which is most rooms, which is why she leaves things early and people think she is aloof.

And they took her confidence that she knows what she is doing when she is in trouble, because she was in trouble for months and can point to no strategy at all.

You have been living without an account of your own worst year, and God has never once required you to produce one. Psalm 56:8 says your wanderings are told and your tears are put in His bottle, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes told off a page and puts it in a bedroom with a rug on the floor. Somebody had the count of those months even though nobody in that house did.

Out of the pit, and the verbs all belong to Him

There is one line built for a woman who does not know how she got anywhere.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

Four verbs. Brought up, set, established, and the fourth is the one nobody notices: established my goings. Not gave me the will to go. Established the going itself. The motion is His, the direction is His, and the person in the clay does not contribute a single verb to that sentence, and it is His Spirit who makes that land on a bedroom floor rather than remaining a well loved psalm.

You were moved eight feet by somebody who establishes goings, and the going was never a thing you organized. That is not a soft reading of a hard year. The written word gives all four verbs to Him and leaves the pit as a pit, and the Spirit is the one who got a young woman across a rug on afternoons she cannot remember. Her mother heard a floorboard. Psalm 40 does not put the credit on the floorboard.

And this must be said plainly. Those months are not a display. They were not arranged so a family could learn something by watching a daughter make it to a window. God did not put you in a silence to give your mother a reason to breathe. You are not an exhibit and you never were.

Two things a woman with no strategy has to hear

The first is that God still moves people who have no plan. Not moved, poetically, in an older world. Moves, present tense, across eight feet, at three in the afternoon.

The second is that the moving was not a reward for effort. There was no effort. There was a floorboard and a window seat, and that was all.

You were brought up out of it by somebody else's four verbs, and none of them waited for you to be able to speak. Psalm 30:1 says I will extol You, for You have lifted me up, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes lifted into a physical fact about a room rather than a devotional idea.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the quiet is coming back, or if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line first. That is not the year returning to claim you. That is God sending help with a face and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.