The Fourth Month Of Nothing

The family room on the third floor has a window that gets the sun at about twenty past six, and Cora has learned to sit in the chair on the left because that is where the light lands first, and for around four minutes the whole room goes the color of weak honey and the vending machine hums and nothing is required of her.

She is four months into this.

Her father had the stroke in April. He is not going home, and everybody involved knows he is not going home, and nobody has said it in a room with him in it. He knows her about half the time. The other half he is polite, which is the worst of the two, because her father was never once polite to her in his life and she did not know until April how much she needed the rudeness.

She works Monday to Friday at the county office. She does not take time off, because the time off has to be saved for the things that get scheduled, and because if she stops moving on a weekday she does not entirely trust what happens next. So it is the ward at seven, the office at nine, the ward again at six, home at nine thirty, and then a stretch of the evening she could not describe to you if you asked, and then bed, and then the alarm.

People ask how she is. She says, oh, you know. Getting there.

She has told nobody. Not her brother, who lives four hours away and calls on Sundays and means well and cannot be told, because telling him would only move the weight from one person to two and she cannot bear the arithmetic of that. Not Marion at work, who would be kind, and then would keep being kind, and Cora does not have the reserves to be looked after. Not her own children, who have their own lives and who she has decided are not going to spend their twenties worried about their mother.

Here is what she would say if she said it, and it is not dramatic and that is exactly why she cannot say it.

There is nothing there anymore.

Not despair. Not anger. Not even sadness most days, which frightens her more than the sadness did. She goes into the bay and she holds his hand and she says the things, and she watches herself do it from somewhere about three feet behind her own shoulder, and she feels precisely nothing, and then she goes to work and does a competent day and comes back and does it again. She has stopped praying, not on purpose, the way you stop watering something. Four months ago she would have called this a crisis. Now it is just Tuesday.

At twenty past six this morning the sun came through the window in the family room and landed on the arm of the chair and on the back of her hand, and she sat and looked at her own hand in the light for a while, and Ivan the night porter came in to fill the water jug and said, morning, and she said, morning, and he went out again.

That was the entire event. She sat there another minute after he left.

He restoreth, and the verb has a subject

There is a line everybody can say from memory, and because everybody can say it from memory nobody looks at who is doing what in it.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.Psalm 23:3

He restoreth. Not, I restore myself with adequate self care. Not, I recover if I manage the situation better. The whole sentence has one subject and it is not the sheep, and the sheep is not consulted about the timing, and the reason given at the end is His own name and not the sheep's performance.

You are carried, and you were carried through every hour of the fourth month you cannot remember. I am not saying that to make the tiredness sound noble. Psalm 23:3 is written and it stands, and the restoring belongs to Him in the plain grammar of the verse. The Holy Spirit is not standing at the end of an empty season with a clipboard waiting to see whether you make it.

Now the thing about a season with nothing in it.

An empty season is not a failure. It is not evidence about you, and it is not a verdict on four months of doing an impossible thing with no help. Numbness after a long stretch of grief and vigilance is what a body does, and it is closer to a callus than a sin: it is the thing that has let you keep walking into that bay at seven in the morning for a hundred and something mornings. God is not offended by it, He has not gone quiet on account of it, and He is not waiting for you to feel something before He starts.

You have a Shepherd who does the restoring, and that verb was never assigned to you. Psalm 23 puts every active thing in His column, and Scripture is where that is written down rather than a thing somebody once said to be encouraging. What the Spirit adds is that this is present tense. Not a plan for after. Now, in the chair on the left, at twenty past six.

What the gauge is actually measuring

Here is the confusion that has been running quietly under all of it, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

There is a gauge in you and it reads empty and the reading is honest. It is measuring something real. What it is measuring is your capacity: your sleep, your reserves, the sheer number of things you have been holding at once since April. That gauge has never at any point been able to measure the light, because the light is not stored in you. It is not a tank you have been drawing down. It came from Christ and it stays lit because of Christ, and there is no line on any instrument in your body that reports on it.

You are lit by Christ, and the tiredness is not a reading on that. John 8:12 says Jesus is the light of the world and Matthew 5:14 says the same sentence over you, and both are written, and neither one has a clause about how you slept. The word said it first. The Spirit says it again, this morning, with the vending machine humming.

Which is why rest is not a dimming.

If you sleep for eleven hours on Saturday, nothing goes out. If you sit in the chair for four minutes doing nothing at all while the sun crosses the arm of it, nothing goes out. A lamp is not dimmer while the room it is in is quiet. Matthew 5:15 has the lamp on the stand giving light to everyone in the house, and it does not add a single instruction to the lamp, and a lamp that is being carried through a hospital corridor by somebody who has nothing left is still a lamp and is still lit.

You were the light of the world at seven this morning with your father's hand in yours and nothing whatsoever going on inside you. That is not sentimental. It is what the written line says, and it did not come with a feelings requirement attached. The same Spirit who was in that bay is the One in the family room, and He did not need you to notice.