The Step At The Front Door

Four inches. That is the whole thing. Four inches of concrete between the path and the front door.

He has done it maybe nine hundred times now. Chair backward, tip, lift, and the little grunt he tries not to make because she hates it when he grunts. Then the door, which needs a shoulder because it swelled in the spring and he has not had a free afternoon to plane it. Then the mat, which catches the front castors every single time.

And then, most days, he goes back out for the shopping bags and he stands in the hallway on his own for a second with his hand on the radiator, and he does not cry exactly, but something happens in his chest that he has no word for and does not want one.

Out on the street they have a word for him. The woman at number twelve said it to somebody at the corner and it got back to him. He is an absolute rock, that man. Every day, rain or shine. You would not believe what he does for her.

He knows exactly what he does for her. He does not recognize the man they are describing. The man they are describing would not have stood in the kitchen last Thursday with a dish towel in his hands thinking a thought so tired and so ugly that he has not been able to look at it since.

You have a step like that. Maybe it is a stair lift, or a set of pills in a plastic tray with the days on it, or a phone call you make every evening at seven. And somewhere out there, people who love you have made you into a noun.

Say what it costs, and say it first

Number twelve did not price it, so let us.

It costs his back, which he has not mentioned to a doctor. It costs the version of the marriage where the two of them used to sit and watch something silly on a Sunday, because now every hour has a task in it. It costs him the plain right to be asked how he is by somebody who will stay for the answer, because the answer would frighten people, and then he would have to be gentle with them about being frightened, and there is not a scrap left over for that.

And it costs him the thought in the kitchen last Thursday, which he is now carrying around as evidence against himself.

You have been carrying a cost that nobody on that street has counted, and God has never once looked at the thought in the kitchen and revised His opinion of you. Psalm 103:13 says that like a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a word like pities and lays it gently over a man with a dish towel instead of leaving it in a book. He was not disgusted by Thursday. He was in the kitchen.

What is underneath, and why nobody can see it

There is one line for a man in a hallway with his hand on a radiator.

The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

Underneath. That is the whole word. Not around you, where people could see. Not above you, where it might make a nice photograph. Underneath, which is the one direction nobody ever looks, and which is exactly where load actually gets carried. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old blessing spoken over a tribe into something that holds a specific tired man up on a specific Tuesday.

You are being held up from underneath, and the holding is what your street has been calling you. That is not a compliment in disguise. The written word puts the arms below the man and the refuge around him, and the Spirit is the one keeping somebody upright nine hundred times over a four inch step. Nobody at the corner thanked the right one. You cannot see underneath.

And this needs saying or the site turns cruel. Her stroke is not a display. It was not arranged so a street could learn something by watching a man cope. God did not put her in that chair to make a point at number twelve. Neither of you is an exhibit and neither of you ever was.

Two things a tired man has to hear

The first is that God still shelters people. Not sheltered, once, in a poetic older world. Shelters, present tense, in a hallway, this afternoon. If everlasting arms is only a lovely old phrase, then this is just unusually good coping, the street had it right, and there is nowhere to take Thursday.

The second is that the arms are under him. Now. Not under stronger husbands. Not under men who never had the thought.

You have a shelter that was given to you rather than earned by you, and it does not come out from under you on the days you have an ugly thought with a dish towel in your hands. Isaiah 46:4 says He carries, even to old age, and that He made and will bear and will deliver, and His Spirit is the one who makes carries into something a spine can feel.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the tiredness has stopped being tiredness and gone somewhere frightening, 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 before you call anybody else. That is not the arms giving way. That is the arms arriving with a face and a telephone, and reaching for them is obedience rather than collapse.