The Television Until Two

The wall between the living room and the small bedroom at the back of that house is one sheet of drywall and a stud every sixteen inches, which Marcus knows because he helped Dean patch a hole in it during his first month.

He is twenty four. He gets up at five forty because the yard he works at opens at six thirty and the bus takes what it takes. He has a chair, a bed, a lamp with a shade that does not sit straight, and a pair of headphones with foam that has started to flake off onto his pillow.

The television goes on around seven every evening and it goes off around two, and in between there are five other people out there and none of them are trying to hurt him.

That is the part that took him longest to understand.

They are not cruel. Dean drove him to the emergency room at three in the morning in his second year over a thumb that turned out to be fine, and would not take gas money afterward, and made a joke about it for eight months. Priya leaves half of whatever she cooks on the middle shelf with his name on the lid. Somebody, and he has never worked out who, replaces the light bulb in the hallway every single time without being asked.

They are just loud. They are loud in the way six people in one house at eleven at night are loud, and the language that comes through that wall stopped being funny somewhere in the middle of his first year and has not been funny since.

He used to answer it. Early on he would come out and stand in the doorway and say something, half joking, and they would half apologize and turn it down for eleven minutes.

Now he does not come out.

Now he lies on his back with the light off, headphones on, one song on repeat because a song he knows the shape of does not make him listen to it. He can feel the bass in the drywall against his shoulder blade. Some nights the blue light comes under the door and moves across the carpet like weather.

And the thought comes, most nights, somewhere between one and two.

Whatever was in me when I moved in here is going out. Not fast. Just going.

At five forty the alarm goes. He steps over somebody's shoes in the hall. The kettle is warm because one of them has only just gone to bed.

He makes coffee in the dark and stands at the kitchen window and watches the streetlight go off across the road, the way it does every morning, about six minutes before it needs to.

In the middle of it

Paul writes a letter to a small group of believers living in a Roman colony called Philippi, a town full of retired soldiers and shrines and ordinary loud commerce, and none of them had a house of their own to be holy in.

He tells them what they are. And the phrase he uses to say where they are doing it is the phrase everybody skips.

In the midst of.

Not once they get out. Not after the neighborhood improves. In the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, right there, in the middle of it, he says they shine as lights in the world.

You are shining in the middle of it, and the middle is exactly where the sentence puts you. Philippians 2:15 places the light and the crooked place in one breath, written down that way on purpose, and the Spirit is not waiting for a room to go quiet before He agrees with what is already on the page.

so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation. Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky.Philippians 2:15

Let me say one thing plainly before I go on, because I would rather say it and not need to than need it and not have said it. If what is happening in that house has stopped being loudness and started being danger, please tell somebody who can actually help you today. Staying is not the holy option when you are not safe, and leaving would not put you out.

You have not been left somewhere God lost track of. The written word names the crooked place and the shining in the same sentence rather than pretending one cancels the other, and His Spirit says that over a young man on his back at one in the morning with bass in the drywall.

The word Paul reached for

The word he uses for lights is worth two minutes.

It is not the word for a torch somebody carries, and it is not the word for a fire somebody builds. It is the word the Greek Old Testament uses in the opening chapter of Genesis for the lamps in the sky, the sun and the moon and the stars, the ones God set in place on the fourth day.

Set in place. Positioned. They did not apply for the job and they did not choose the sky they hang in.

You were placed, and a placed lamp is not required to justify its position. Genesis 1:17 says God set them in the expanse, and Philippians 2:15 reaches back and picks up that same word for you. The word said it first. The Spirit says it again, tonight, in a back bedroom with a lamp shade that does not sit straight.

And there is a second thing in that image that matters more than the first, and it is this: none of those lights are wired to the ground underneath them.

Nothing that happens on a street changes what a star is doing. It is not a comment on the neighborhood. It is not a reward for a good week down there. The house can be loud until two in the morning and the light overhead is unaffected, because the two things were never connected in the first place.

You are lit by Christ, and the switch for that is not anywhere in that living room. Scripture puts the placing and the shining in God's hands from beginning to end, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write it is the One quietly holding it steady in a man who has stopped coming out of his room.

Nobody in that house has your switch. Not Dean, not the television, not the language, not the nights when it goes on past two.