Somebody Else's Ladder

Six in the morning on a street of row houses, and Renee is sitting on the third step from the bottom with her coat folded over her knees.

The ladder is still in the back of her hatchback, sticking out past the folded seats, one leg wrapped in a dish towel so it stops scratching the trunk lid. It has lived in that car for four years. It started the night a smoke alarm began chirping at eleven o'clock and she drove clear across town in her slippers and stood on that ladder in a hallway and got the battery out, and afterward the two of them laughed so hard about the slippers that she had to sit down on the floor.

She has been on this step since a quarter past two. Third address in eighteen months. Third phone number. Same street, more or less. Same conversation, more or less. Behind her, inside, her friend is asleep now, and Renee came out here because the step was closer than the car.

So she does the arithmetic she has done before. The boxes she taped and carried. The forms she filled in herself, in her own handwriting, because the handwriting had to be neat and legible and there was no time to teach anybody. The Tuesday she called in sick to her own job to sit in a waiting room with a magazine she never opened. And the number of times she has said the sentence, we cannot keep doing this, followed immediately by the number of times she has personally made sure it stopped happening, which is the part that quietly cancels the sentence.

And then the thing she has not said out loud, the thing that has been sitting on her chest since about four. She does not know anymore which parts of this are hers. Somewhere in four years the two lives got braided together. She knows this woman's schedule, her mother's birthday, the exact half tone in her voice that means the plan has come apart again. And if you asked Renee this morning what she herself wanted for her own next year, she would sit on that step and look at you and have nothing to say. She has not thought about her own next year in a long while.

The sky is starting up behind the roofline now, going that thin gray that turns gold about ten minutes later. The ladder is in the car. And Renee sits there with the strangest thought she has had in four years, which is not that she should stop caring, and is not that she was a fool for any of it, but simply this.

Whose ladder is that?

You know that step. You have sat on some version of it, in a coat, in the almost light. You went up after somebody. Then you went up again. You are not sorry you went, not one climb of it, and you also cannot find the seam anymore between their life and your own.

What Is That To You

There is a moment on a beach after breakfast that almost nobody preaches, and it is the most useful sentence in Scripture for a woman on a step at six in the morning.

Peter has just been restored. The coals are still warm. He has just been asked three times whether he loves, and told three times to feed. And then, immediately, in the very next breath, Peter turns his head, looks at John walking behind them, and asks the question that every one of us asks. What about him. What happens to him.

You are free of a weight that was never issued to you. John 21:22 already asked the question in four words, what is that to you, and the Spirit is not asking you to work the answer out from scratch on a step this morning.

Jesus said to him, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!"John 21:22

Read the tone right, because everything depends on the tone. That is not a cold sentence. That is not Jesus telling Peter to stop caring about John, and it is not a rebuke for asking. It is a man having a weight lifted off him before he has finished picking it up. Peter had just reached for the outcome of somebody else's whole life, and Jesus took it out of his hands in one short question and gave him back a road with his own name on it.

Which is worth sitting with, because the same hands that lifted it are still doing the lifting.

You have been loving somebody the whole time, and there is no ledger anywhere that says otherwise. No sentence of mine could clear that for you. Scripture does it, where it says love bears and believes and endures all things, and His Spirit is what has been doing the bearing in you at a quarter past two in the morning while everybody else slept.

So let us be careful about what we are pulling apart here. Not your love. Not the going. What is coming apart is the braid, and only the braid.

A Limit Is Not A Verdict

Here is the sentence that has been running quietly underneath four years, and it needs saying plainly, because it is not true and it is doing a great deal of damage. If I had done it better, she would be somewhere else by now.

You were never given the outcome of another person's life to produce. That is Scripture, not a coping strategy, and the Spirit is what makes it hold. Look at how Galatians handles it. Bear one another's burdens, says one line, and four verses later, each will have to bear his own load. Those two sentences sit in the same short chapter, written by the same hand, and they are not a contradiction. They are a description of two different objects.

A burden is the thing too heavy for the moment, the crate at the bottom of the stairs, the meal on the day nobody could cook. You get under it, you lift, you set it down, you go home. A load is the thing a person carries because it is their own life, and it does not transfer. It cannot be lifted off, not by you, not by anybody who loves them best, not by anybody at all. And the exhaustion you are carrying is what it feels like to have spent four years trying to lift an object that has no handles.

You are being handed back your own hands. It is written down, in Galatians 6:5, that each one carries his own load, and the Spirit set that line four verses from its twin so that nobody would ever have to guess which object was theirs.

And hear the other half of it, because half of this crushes people. A better effort from you would not have changed the outcome. That is not an insult to your effort. It is the point. Your effort was never the mechanism. You were never the mechanism, and being told so is not being demoted, it is being released from a job title nobody ever actually gave you.

You are held at the exact place where your reach runs out. You are not taking my word for that. His word calls Him a very present help in trouble, and the Spirit is what carries a line like that off a page and onto a concrete step at six in the morning.