The Third Stair Worn Through

Nia is sitting on the landing at half past eleven with the torch on her phone, looking down at the third stair.

The carpet is oatmeal, hard wearing, twelve years old, and on that one tread it has gone through. Not thin. Through. There is a pale patch about the size of a thumbprint where the fibers have given up altogether and you can see the backing underneath, gray and fibrous like the inside of a teabag.

It is the third stair because that is the one you land on with your whole weight if you go up two at a time in the dark, and for eleven months she went up two at a time in the dark, four and five times a night, because Elis was in the back bedroom and the monitor was rubbish and she never once trusted it.

Elis is nine. He is in the school production in November, playing a postman with two lines, one of which he has already changed without telling anybody. He does not remember most of it. That is the mercy in the whole thing and she thanks God for it about once a fortnight.

And on Thursday her sister-in-law sent a message that said, you are so much stronger than you were, honestly, I mean it.

Her manager said something like it in the review. A woman at church, kindly, with a hand on her back, said there is a real steel in you now.

Nia says thank you. She always says thank you.

Here is what she has never said out loud to any of them.

I am not stronger. I am thinner.

Not weight. There is just less of her than there used to be. She used to be able to hold four things at once and be funny while she did it. She can hold two now. She holds them beautifully, better than she ever held four, and everyone calls that strength, and from the inside it does not feel like strength. It feels like a narrower woman doing a smaller amount very carefully because there is nothing spare.

She used to talk in the car. Now she drives.

So she sits on the landing with the torch, and she looks at the place where the carpet has gone, and she thinks: that is the honest picture. Not steel. Wear.

I want to slow down here, because you know exactly why you opened this.

It might not be a stair. It might be that you cannot watch anything with a hospital corridor in it. It might be that you cry at a supermarket advert and did not cry once on the actual anniversary. It might be that four people have told you this year how well you have coped, and every one of them has left you feeling further away.

And if you are reading this while it is still going on, with no afterwards yet because nothing has ended, put this down and go and do the next thing. There is nothing here you need tonight.

Both of them, in one sentence, with no explanation

Paul writes one sentence with two clauses in it, and almost everybody quotes the second half.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer person is wasting away, our inner person is being renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Read the joint in the middle. It is though, not because.

He does not say the wasting produced the renewing. He does not say the wearing was the mechanism, or the cause, or the curriculum. He says that on the same day, in the same person, both of those are running, and he does not attempt to reconcile them for us. 2 Corinthians 4:16 leaves them side by side on purpose, and the Holy Spirit keeps the second clause going in people who can only feel the first. You are being renewed today, in a house where the only thing you can feel is that there is less of you.

Notice also which one he names first. The wearing.

He does not soften it, apologize for it, or hurry past it to get to the encouraging bit. Wasting away is his own phrase about his own body and his own year, and it went into Scripture exactly as he said it. So the thing you have never said out loud is not a failure to flourish, and the Spirit did not flinch when you thought it on a landing at half past eleven. You are allowed to be accurate about the wear.

And now the sentence I am only going to say once.

The eleven months did not make you anything. I am not going to tell you that the ward deepened you, or that God was using it, or that this is what it was for. It was not for anything. Nobody's child is ill in order to produce a better parent, and any comfort built on that foundation will fall on you later, at an hour when there is even less left to carry it with.

What Paul says is that the renewing is going on. He never says what it is going on because of.

The instrument nobody hands you

The real difficulty is not the wear. It is that you have been asked to believe in something with no read-out.

You cannot feel the renewing. That is not a defect in you. 2 Corinthians 5:7 says we walk by trust and not by sight, and sight there is not only what you see out of the window, it includes the long assessment you run on yourself with a torch at half past eleven. The Holy Spirit is what carries a person across a gap like that. You are not required to feel it in order for it to be happening.

And here is a strange kindness that arrives from an odd direction.

1 Samuel 16:7 says the Lord does not see the way a person sees, because a person looks at the outside and the Lord looks at the heart. That sentence is usually read as a comfort about other people's opinions, and it is, and it takes the verdict out of your sister-in-law's hands. But read it again, because it takes the verdict out of yours in exactly the same breath. The Spirit is not consulting either of you. You are read accurately by the only one whose reading is accurate, and He is not worried about what He is looking at.

So your friends are not the proof. And your own flat feeling is not the disproof. Both of those instruments were built for something else.

Look at who is holding the verb, too. Being renewed. Not renewing yourself, not maintaining it, not keeping it up. Colossians 3:3 puts it even further out of reach: your life is hidden with Christ in God, and hidden is not the same word as gone. The Spirit is running that work somewhere with no window in it. You have a life at this moment that is entirely out of your own sight and entirely safe.

Then there is the timing, which is the part that undoes measurement altogether.

Day by day, Paul says. Hear how useless that is if you were hoping to check your progress. There is no total in it. There is no by-the-end-of-the-year in it. It is the Spirit's own pace inside 2 Corinthians 4:16, and it was never handed to anybody as a chart. You are not behind, because there is no line to be behind.