Bottom Stair, Half Past Seven

The day has started. That is the strange part. The day is well underway around her and she is not in it.

There is cartoon noise from the front room. There is a bowl on the floor by the sofa that she can see from here and will have to deal with. There is a bag by the door that needs a water bottle in it and she knows exactly which cupboard the water bottle is in.

And she is sitting on the bottom stair with both feet on the hall floor and her hands on her knees, in the clothes she slept in, and she has been there for eleven minutes.

Not crying. That would almost be easier and she would know what to do with it. Just sitting, in a house that is running without her, unable to convert the knowing into the standing.

The fourth morning like this. She counted, which is a mistake, and she knows it is a mistake, and she counted anyway.

Nothing dramatic has happened. That is what makes this so hard to say to anybody. Nobody has left, nobody has died, nothing has been diagnosed. There is a slow flattening that started somewhere around February and there is no story to tell about it, so she does not tell anybody, because a person needs a reason to be like this and she does not have one.

The sentence comes at about minute eight, every morning. Not I am tired. It is: everybody else can just start their day, and something in me is broken.

You know that stair. It might be the edge of a bed, or a car in a car park with the engine off, or a chair you sit down in for a minute at eleven in the morning. There is a place in your house where the day should begin and does not, and by now the place itself has begun to feel like a verdict.

The verse everybody quotes stops one line too early

There is a pair of lines in a psalm, and almost everybody knows the first half and almost nobody says the second.

Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand.Psalm 37:24

Look at what is doing the work in that sentence. It is not he shall pick himself up. It is not he shall try again. The reason the falling does not finish him has nothing to do with anything he generates. It is one hand, and the hand is not his.

That is not a small adjustment to how you have been reading your mornings. It is the whole thing turned over.

You are being upheld by the hand of God on this fourth morning, sitting on a bottom stair in yesterday's clothes, and that hand has not moved once since February. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft thing I have decided to offer somebody having a bad week, and the Holy Spirit who is in you as you read this is the evidence that the holding has never depended on you getting up.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic you run at minute eight. If the upholding is His, then eleven minutes on a stair is information about a flattening that started in February and that you did not choose. It is not information about something broken in you, and it never had the standing to become that.

Nobody is asking you to launch yourself

Here is the second thing, and this is where the actual weight comes off.

Everything written and said about mornings like this quietly assumes that the answer is a bigger push. Get up earlier. Make the bed. One small win. And there is nothing wrong with any of that except the assumption underneath it, which is that the power to begin a day has to be manufactured by the person who cannot begin it.

This site does not believe that and is not going to say it to you. There is no exhortation coming.

You have been carried through all four of these mornings, and the carrying did not weaken on the ones where you sat down longest. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than standing in the hallway waiting for you to demonstrate willingness.

And there is something else worth saying plainly. This flattening may well be something a doctor should hear about, and telling one is not a failure of faith and never has been. God is not competing with a prescription or a conversation in a surgery. If part of what He is doing this week is getting you to an appointment, that is not a detour from the spiritual answer. It is the spiritual answer arriving with a receptionist.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a nice thought on a cold stair. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not thought about for eleven minutes. And the thing in the way is not the bag by the door and it is not the bowl on the floor. It is a sentence: something in me is broken. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like somebody with any authority in yesterday's clothes. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much of yourself you could put behind them.

If any of this has taken you somewhere darker than tiredness, and there are mornings when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.