Nine Winters Of Not Answering

There is a flat gray stone on the sill outside Marta's front door and it used to have a job. It held the door open. From April to October it sat against the bottom of it and the door stood wide and the hall smelled of whatever was on the stove, and people put their heads in without knocking because there was nothing to knock on.

The stone has not moved in nine years. It sits there now the way anything sits when its work has been taken off it.

Tonight the door is shut and bolted at the top, and Marta is standing in the hall with her back not quite touching the wall, because somebody has knocked.

She knows exactly what she is doing, and she is not a nervous woman. She is standing very still with a dish towel over her shoulder, and she has stopped breathing the way people stop breathing, and she is waiting for the footsteps to go back down the path. In the kitchen the kettle she filled four minutes ago is going quiet as it cools, and she can hear it ticking, and she thinks, not for the first time, that a kettle cooling is one of the loneliest sounds there is.

Nine winters ago she answered a knock. A young man, wet through, a long story with an ending in it that she believed. He stayed three weeks in the back room. She fed him and put a hot bottle in the bed and did not ask him anything he did not want to say, and one Tuesday he was gone and so was her husband's fiddle, which was the only thing in that house she would have run back into a fire for. She heard afterward, from a woman at the market who told her kindly and enjoyed it anyway, that he had been telling people in the next town how easy she was.

That is the whole of it. It is not a large story. Nobody died. And yet nine winters later the stone is on the sill doing nothing, and there is a bolt at the top of the door that a joiner fitted for her on a Saturday, and she stands in her own hall not breathing.

She would tell you it is sense. She has told herself so about a thousand times, standing in exactly this spot, and here is the thing she has never quite been able to get past: she is right. It is sense. A woman who has been taken once and does not want to be taken again is not a broken woman. She is a woman who learned something.

The footsteps go. She hears the gate. She goes back into the kitchen and puts her hand flat on the side of the kettle, and it is barely warm, and she boils it again for one cup.

You know that hall. Maybe your bolt is a phone left face down, or a route you take now that adds four minutes, or a way of saying you are busy that has become so smooth you no longer hear yourself do it. You are not a cold person. You are somebody who learned something the hard way and has been carrying the lesson ever since, and something that used to be easy in you has gone stiff, and you would give a great deal to have it back without having to be a fool again to get it.

Nothing In You Is Broken. Something In You Went Dry.

I want to say the first thing plainly, because if it is not said first, nothing after it will be heard properly.

Nobody is telling you off. Not for the bolt, not for the nine winters, not for standing in the hall. You were not wrong to protect yourself, and any message that begins by scolding a woman for flinching has misunderstood both the flinch and the woman.

You have not been rebuked once for that bolt, and you are not being rebuked now. That is Scripture and not sentiment, in Isaiah 42:3, a bruised reed He does not break and a smoking wick He does not quench, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that move in a hallway rather than sit in a book.

So the work is not on your character. Your character is fine. The work is on something else, something smaller and more particular, and it is best described as a thing that dried up. There was a moisture in you once, an easiness, a way of hearing a knock and going toward it without an argument happening first. That did not become wickedness. It became dry. And dry things do not need rebuking. They need water.

The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Look at the verb He chose for Himself. Drawn. Not driven, not marched, not corrected into place. You were loved on the far side of that winter with the very love that is on you tonight. Jeremiah 31:3 already said it, an everlasting love and a drawing done with kindness, and the Spirit is not waiting for you to feel it before it is true of you.

Drawn, Not Driven

Here is what nine years of not answering actually costs, and it is worth naming, because the cost is the only reason to say anything at all.

The bolt does not know the difference between a young man with a long story and a girl from two doors up who has lost her key. It is a bolt. It has one setting. And the loss is not that you have become somebody who never helps, because you help constantly and you always have. The loss is that the easy kind of helping went away with the hard kind, and the easy kind was most of it.

You are being drawn, and drawn is not the same as driven. The Spirit has never once used a shove, and it is written into Romans 2:4 in plain words, that it is the goodness of God that leads a person anywhere at all. If something in you is stirring while you read this and you cannot tell whether it is hope or indigestion, that is the drawing, and it is gentle on purpose.

And notice what He is not asking for. He is not asking you to explain the fiddle. He is not asking you to say you were wrong, because you were not, or to declare that you have changed your mind about anything, or to produce a warmer feeling before your hands are allowed to move. You are standing in a hallway God is not angry about. It is written down, in Psalm 147:3, that He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, and the same Spirit who put that sentence there is standing in the hall with you while you read this one.

Softening is not the same as unlearning. You are allowed to keep everything that winter taught you. You are allowed to keep the bolt. What is being offered is not the removal of your good sense; it is the return of the part that had nothing to do with sense in the first place, the part that put a stone against a door in April because the house was better with air moving through it.

You have something soft left in you, and nine winters did not use it up. You are not taking my word for this. His word says in Zechariah 4:10 that nobody despises the day of small things, and the Spirit is what carries a line like that off a page and into a kitchen where a kettle is cooling.