The Whole World Is This Window

The room used to be the dining room. Now it is the room, and everybody in the family has stopped calling it the dining room without anybody deciding to.

The bed came down in June. The good chair came down in July. The table went to his sister in August and nobody said out loud why.

From where he sits he has the window over the yard, and the yard has a lemon tree his wife planted that has never once given a lemon anybody could use, and a line of washing, and the corner of the neighbor's roof. In the mornings the light comes across the sill and lands on the arm of the chair, and by two in the afternoon it has gone up the wall, and he knows that movement the way he used to know a tide.

Sixty-six years old. Upstairs is a country he does not go to. The front step, some days. The street, no.

His grandchildren come and are wonderful and are loud and are gone, and afterward the room is very quiet, and he sits in the good chair and thinks the thing he has never said to any of them, which is not sad exactly and is worse than sad.

The world got smaller and I got left on the ground floor of it.

If your world has a window in it and the window is most of the world, then you already know that the visitors do not fix it, and you know you would never say that to them.

Seated is a past tense verb about a place nobody photographed

Weigh it first, and weigh it properly, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it comes at full size.

What this costs is not the stairs. It is the shrinking of the map. It costs upstairs, which is a whole floor of a house that has your handwriting on the doorframes. It costs the street, and the shop, and the specific pleasure of being somewhere by accident. It costs the ordinary way a man measures a day, which is by where he went. It cost the table, which went to your sister for a good reason nobody could bring themselves to say. And it costs you the quiet after the grandchildren, which is when the sentence comes, and the sentence is not a complaint, it is a description, and that is why it stays.

I am not calling that small and I am not setting it beside anybody else's, because on this site nobody's load is ever weighed against another's. Any word from God that needs your room made bigger first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, right here rather than at the end: if the quiet after the visitors has gone past sadness into thinking the family would have more life without a room like this in the house, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of your children, a neighbor who will sit in the yard, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture never asks a man to hold that on his own, and the Holy Spirit has always worked through people who come and sit down.

Now, Ephesians. Paul writing from a room he could not leave either, which is worth knowing before you read the verb.

And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.Ephesians 2:6

Raised. Made to sit. Both past. Both done to you rather than by you.

And that phrase, made us sit together, is not a picture of somebody being told to stay put. In the world that letter went into, to be seated was to have arrived, to be at rest, to be at the table with the standing of somebody who belongs there. A servant stands. A guest sits.

You were seated, and the seating happened in a place your legs have never been consulted about. Ephesians 2:6 puts it in the completed tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence written by a man under guard land in a room that used to be a dining room.

Notice the small word together, because it is in there twice and it is not decoration. Raised up together. Made to sit together. Paul will not let the reader be seated on their own. Whatever else is true about your afternoons, the arrangement described in that verse is not a solitary one.

You have a seat at a table that was set before the bed came downstairs. That is written in Ephesians 2, and His Spirit in you is the guarantee that the seating is a fact about a real place rather than a nice way of putting things.

Now the honest part, because you have had a year of good people saying warm things in a doorway.

That verse says nothing about your stairs. Nothing about upstairs, nothing about the street, nothing about next summer. It does not predict your body, and I am not going to predict it either, and any man who tells you confidently what your legs will do next year is telling you about himself. What God does there is His, in His own way, and I will not speak for Him about a house I have never been in.

The room may stay the room. I am not going to soften that.

What the verse settles is the other thing. The map. Whether the world genuinely got smaller, or whether the visible part of it did while the actual one did not move at all.

It is already settled where you have been seated, and no floor plan of that house was involved in the decision. The word says God raised you up together and made you sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit given to you is the deposit on a seat that was assigned in the past tense.