My Lying Down Is Most Of The Day Now

There is a crack in the ceiling that goes from the light fixture toward the window and then thinks better of it.

She knows it the way other people know a commute.

The door is open because the door is always open now, and from the bed she can hear the house being a house: the boiler, the fridge, her husband on the phone downstairs being cheerful at somebody about a delivery, next door's dog objecting to a van.

Fifty-two years old. Twenty months.

At about six in the evening the light comes in low and does the thing it does across the closet doors, and that is the good hour, and she waits for it, and she is aware that waiting for a light effect is what her day now has in it where the rest of a life used to be.

What sits underneath all of it, and what she has never said to her husband or her sister or the woman from church who is genuinely lovely, is this. God is presumably interested in people who are going somewhere. There are a great many verses about paths, and roads, and steps ordered, and running and not being weary. She has read them all. She knows them.

She has not found one about a ceiling.

If your day is mostly horizontal, you know that thought does not arrive as a complaint. It arrives as a reasonable conclusion from the available evidence.

He named the lying down on purpose

Weigh it first, at its own size, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it is never hurried.

What this costs is not activity. It is the loss of the units a life gets measured in. It costs the going out, and the coming back, and the whole grammar of a day that has a shape because you moved through it. It costs the small dignity of being the one who answers the door. It costs the ordinary right to be bored by an errand. It costs you the six o'clock light being the event. And it costs you a conclusion you reached alone, about God's interests, from a great deal of reading, which nobody has ever contradicted because nobody knows you have reached it.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your twenty months made lighter before it can be spoken is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, right here: if the hours before the good light have gone past heaviness into thinking the house would run more easily without a room like this in it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your husband, one friend who will sit on the end of the bed and not need it explained, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always worked through people who come up the stairs.

Now, Psalm 139, and read it slowly, because there is a word in the second verse that a woman with a ceiling has been walking past for twenty months.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:1-3

Downsitting. Uprising. Path. And lying down.

David does not write a psalm about a life in motion and then add a polite line at the end for people who are ill. He builds the whole thing out of pairs, on purpose, in the Hebrew way, so that between the two poles of each pair there is nothing left out. Sitting down and getting up. Going out and lying down. He is not listing activities. He is drawing a box around the whole of a life and saying: all of it, no gaps.

You are inside a sentence that names the lying down specifically, not as an afterthought but as one of the two poles. Psalm 139:3 puts your path and your lying down in the same clause under the same verb, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a psalm you have read forty times and makes the second half of that line visible.

And look at the verb He uses. Compassest. To encircle, to go around, to hem in on every side. It is a verb about surrounding a thing rather than accompanying it. You do not need to be moving for something to be around you.

That is the exact word for a room. A path can be walked with. A lying down can only be surrounded.

You have been encircled in the position you are actually in, rather than accompanied in one you are not. That is written into Psalm 139:3, and His Spirit is the one who makes the difference between those two words land in a bedroom at six in the evening.

Now let me be honest about what this does not say, because you have had twenty months of lovely people saying warm things at the door.

Psalm 139 does not say you are getting up. Not one word. It makes no prediction about your body, no promise about next spring, and neither the written word nor the Holy Spirit has ever handed anybody a timetable, and I will not make one on God's behalf, because what He does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not tell you the ceiling is a smaller trouble than the road would have been. The psalm does not rank. It does not say your lying down is easier, or lighter, or a gentler assignment. It says it is compassed. Which is a statement about where God is, not a statement about the size of what you are carrying.

You were seen exactly, in the position you are in, and exactly is a different word from lightly. The word says He is acquainted with all your ways, and the same Spirit who searches the deep things is the one who carries that from a page into a room with the door open.