The Car Door In The Street Below

It has been a good year and she has never said that sentence out loud.

Not to Marcia, who rings her every Sunday afternoon and talks for forty minutes about a choir rota. Not to the woman two doors down whose greyhound she walks on Tuesdays. Not to herself, in the flat, with nobody there to hear it.

Twelve months. The nasturtiums in the window box took, which she was not expecting, and they have gone mad and are halfway down the brickwork. Nobody has raised their voice at her since last August. She has slept through until six more often than not. The radiator that never worked works.

By any account that anybody else would use, this has been the best year of her adult life, and she stands at the window at night with the light off.

The window looks down on a residential street where people park. Between about half ten and midnight the cars come back, and a car door shuts, and then another one, and each one arrives in her chest before it reaches her ears. She is thirty two years old and she is listening for a sound she stopped living underneath three years ago.

In the old house it was a car door at the end of the drive. That was the whole of it. Not shouting yet, not a raised hand, nothing you could have described to anybody. Just a car door, and then the length of the gap before the front door, and out of that gap she could tell what the next four hours were going to be. She was very good at it. It was the only skill in the house that worked.

Her father is a frightened man who never once named the thing he was frightened of, and it came out of him as noise, and he is a real person with a real face and I am not going to draw him as a villain to make my point easier. Her mother kept a house running for twenty six years inside those timings. None of that was for anything. I want to say that plainly before we go any further, because the softest lie anyone tells a person like this is that the bad years were quietly making her into somebody. They were not making her into anybody. They were years, and she was already somebody the whole way through them.

You are safe here. If your season has been genuinely alright for a while and you have not once let yourself say so, because saying so out loud feels like putting your hand up in a room, then stay with me. I am not going to tell you the quiet holds.

Who did the dressing

Somebody has probably told you to count your blessings this year, and I understand why they said it, and it is not what Psalm 30 does. That psalm counts nothing. It says you turned my mourning into dancing, you loosened my sackcloth and you clothed me with gladness, and every single verb in that line belongs to God. You are dressed, and you were not the one who dressed you, and His Spirit has been holding that garment on a woman standing in the dark by a window at half eleven.

You have turned my mourning into dancing for me; You have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness.Psalm 30:11

Five lines earlier the same man writes that in his ease he told himself he would never be shaken, and then the face he had been counting on went out of view and he was terrified. David is not a stranger at your window. He is the one person in the book who has stood exactly where you are standing, in a stretch of good, waiting for it to be taken off him. You have a psalm written by somebody who knows precisely what you are listening for, and the Holy Spirit put that admission in the middle of it deliberately.

Now ask that psalm the question you actually want answered, which is whether the good run lasts. It will not tell you. It never says the morning is permanent, it never puts a length on the favor, and it does not hand David a single guarantee about next year. What it settles is who did the loosening and who did the clothing. You are held by the one who dressed you rather than by the length of the season, and the Spirit will not trade you a promise God never made.

And the fear in that room is not really a fear of noise. It is the suspicion that a good year is a setup, that something is on its way to take it back, and that the flinch is the sensible response of a woman who knows how these things go. John names that exact thing and says complete love drives it out, because fear like that carries punishment inside it. You are not standing in this year on approval. The Holy Spirit has been at the knot in your throat for twelve months, whether or not one evening of it felt different.

The Holy Spirit is not asking you to stop listening, by the way. He is standing on one line of John 10, that no one snatches them out of My hand, and He is saying it over a dark front room at half eleven with the nasturtiums going brown at the edges. You have not been left holding this good year on your own, and you never were.

So here is what I will not do. I will not tell you that nothing bad is coming, because I do not know, and anybody who tells you that is guessing with something of yours. What I will tell you is what the psalm actually settles: the hands that loosened the sackcloth are the hands you are still in. You are safe on the good nights and you are safe on the other ones, and His Spirit is the one making that land tonight rather than in some future you have not been given yet.