The Shoes I Carry Up My Own Stairs

She takes her shoes off at the bottom of the stairs.

Not at the front door, where a person takes their shoes off because the carpet is new. At the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the post, balancing on one leg, the way somebody does when the next fifteen seconds have to be silent. Then she goes up in her socks with both shoes hooked in her left hand, and at the top she sets them down on the boards instead of dropping them.

It is her flat. Her name is on everything about it. She is the top floor, so there is nobody above her at all, and the woman below her drives a night bus and has been gone since seven. The building is empty of anybody who could possibly mind. Three years she has lived here, and she has never once come up those stairs in her shoes.

There are other things, and she notices almost none of them. She turns the cold tap on slowly so the pipe does not knock. She says sorry to the corner of the kitchen table when she catches her hip on it. She has a hallway voice that runs about two thirds of the volume of her work voice, and after nine it drops again, and she has no memory of deciding either of those things.

The house she grew up in had a voice in it that went up and kept going. It came through the bedroom wall, through the floor, down the stairs and round the corner into the kitchen where she was doing her homework, and by eleven she could tell from the first half second whether it was coming back down again or not.

Her mother was funny. People leave that part out of these accounts, and leaving it out makes the story tidier and less true. Her mother could turn a whole room over laughing and did it often, and her father whistled while he shaved and taught her the names of every bird on the feeder. Both of those things were real, and both of them lived in the same house as the voice, and she has never once managed to get all of it into the same sentence, so mostly she says nothing about any of it to anybody.

What she carried out of that house, along with two bags and a box of books, was a body that knows how to arrive somewhere without being heard.

And I want to be careful with the next thing, because this is where people get hurt by kind sentences. That is not a skill. I am not going to call it one. It is a set of instructions a situation handed a girl on a landing, and the situation ended three years ago, and nobody has got round to telling her body.

You are safe here. If you got out of a loud house and the place you live in now is quiet, and you still lower your voice on your own stairs, then hear the plainest thing I have before we go one step further. Nothing about the way you move through your own home is a fault in you. And I am not going to explain that house to you, or tell you it was making something. It was not. Some things are only ever what they were, and the ache of them is allowed to be a plain ache with nothing on the other side of it.

Nobody up there is listening for you

Here is what a loud house teaches a person, and it is not a lesson, it is a load. It teaches the building. Not the people, the building. Which stair gives, which door sticks in damp weather, which way the back gate swings when the wind is southerly. Somebody who has done that for fifteen years does not walk into a room. They read it, and the reading finishes before the thinking starts.

Zephaniah 3:17 puts God in a particular position, and the position is the whole message. Not across the room. Not upstairs, listening down through the floor for a wrong noise. In your midst. Then it says what He is doing while He is standing there, and the verb is not tolerating and it is not putting up with. He rejoices. He sings. You are not being listened for in your own hallway. You are being sung over, and the Spirit has been walking that verse toward you for longer than you have had keys to this place.

I have no standing to tell you to make a noise in your own home. None at all, and I would not try. But the written word has that standing, and it uses it by telling you where God is and what He sounds like while He is there, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off the page and puts it somewhere below the collarbone. You have a house where the quiet is not a rule anybody is enforcing. Nobody set it. Nobody is marking it.

Read the line just before it, because Zephaniah 3:16 says something about hands. Let not your hands grow weak, it says, or in the older wording, let not your hands hang down. It is a picture of a body held ready so long that ready has become its resting shape, arms braced against a thing that finished, and the Spirit is not standing over that asking for more effort. He is asking for less. You were handed a home, not a post to keep watch from. And nobody is late here. Three years is not late, and thirty would not be late either.

The Lord your God is in your midst, a Mighty One who saves. He will rejoice over you with joy. He will be quiet in His love. He will exult over you with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Nobody in that first house ever sat you down and stated the rule out loud. That is exactly what makes it so difficult to argue with now, because an unspoken rule has no author standing there who could take it back. It just sits in the muscle. You have been keeping an agreement that was never signed, and Scripture never made that agreement with you, the Holy Spirit has never once enforced it, and what stands written over you is a God who is glad, out loud, at the sound of you moving about.

Notice what the verse calls Him, because the title is where the comfort actually lives. Not a Mighty One who inspects. A Mighty One who saves, and Zephaniah sets Him down in the middle of a people who had every reason on earth to keep their voices low. You are standing in the midst of that God tonight, and the Spirit is not taking a reading of your volume while you do it.