The Room Behind the Shop

The shop is on a corner and it is good. Four chairs, always full on a Saturday, a bell on the door that has been broken since 2016 and that everybody says they will fix. Marcelle runs it. She has run it since 2013, which means she does the schedule, the ordering, the money, the training, the trouble, and the one client who will not let anybody else touch her hair.

The shop belongs to a man called Errol who lives two towns over and comes in maybe twice a year.

Behind the shop there is a room. It was a storeroom and it still mostly is a storeroom: boxes of color to the ceiling on one wall, the water heater, the mop sink. There is a cot in it, and a rail with Marcelle's clothes on it, and a small mirror she hung herself, and a plug-in lamp. She has slept there for eleven years.

It started as a few weeks when her landlord sold up. Errol said, use the back, no rent, and he meant it kindly, and eleven years later there is still no rent and there is also no lease, no address of her own, and no version of the arrangement written anywhere.

If you ask Marcelle about it, and people do, she says, "I'm lucky. Rent free in this city? I'm lucky."

She is not being brave and she is not being sarcastic. She means it. There are four women in that shop this Saturday who would tell you Marcelle is the luckiest of them, and one of them would be genuinely envious, and Marcelle has believed her own sentence for so long that it has stopped being a sentence and become a fact about the world.

Here is the day it caught. Nothing dramatic.

A girl of about twenty-two, in for a wash, chatting, asked where Marcelle lived and Marcelle said, "Just here, back of the shop," expecting the usual laugh.

And the girl said, "Oh, like, temporarily?"

And Marcelle said, "Eleven years."

And the girl, who was young and had not yet learned to smooth things over, said, "Eleven years?" and then went red and said sorry, and Marcelle laughed and turned the water on and said something funny, and the afternoon went on.

But that night, lying on the cot with the water heater clicking, Marcelle said the word lucky out loud in the dark, on purpose, to hear it, and it did not sound the way it usually sounds.

You have a word like that. Something you say about your situation that everybody accepts, that has some truth in it, and that has been doing the job of a closed door for so long that you have never once put it down and looked at what is behind it.

The eyes get opened first

Let me tell you what I am not doing here, because I can feel the bracing from where I am standing.

I am not going to tell you what your situation is. I cannot see it and I do not know the man who owns your shop, and I am not going to hand you a verdict on him. I am not telling you to go and I am not telling you to stay. That is not a thing a page can decide and I would be lying to you if I acted like it was.

What I am going to do is put you in front of a line in Isaiah, and I want you to notice the order of the verbs.

I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.Isaiah 42:6-7

Open the eyes. Then bring out the prisoners.

That is the order, and it is not decorative. There is a state a person can be in where nothing about the situation is hidden and the person still cannot see it. Marcelle knows every fact about that room. She could recite the lease she does not have. Nothing is concealed from her. And she has been eleven years unable to look at it, because lucky got there first.

You are held by somebody whose first stated work is opening eyes, and He never once required a person to see clearly before He would come near them. Isaiah 42:7 puts the opening at the front of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient commission and applies it in a back room with a water heater clicking.

And then the second thing, which is the one I want you to hear even more. To bring out the prisoners. Not to advise them. Not to inform them of their rights. To bring out. The verb has somebody doing it, and the somebody is not the one inside.

You were never assigned the job of getting yourself out, and the whole of Isaiah 42 is one long refusal to put that on anybody. It is written that He brings out those who sit in darkness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a load-bearing sentence rather than a poetic one.

Lucky is a word that closes a door

Now let me be careful here, because a message like this hurts people if it goes clumsy.

Lucky is not a lie. There genuinely are people who would take that room tomorrow. Marcelle's rent being zero in that city is a real thing and it has kept her from a great deal of trouble, and Errol is not a monster, he is an absent man who did a kind thing once and never thought about it again, and those are two of the commonest facts in the world.

I am not here to make you angry at somebody who helped you. That is not deliverance. That is just resentment with a verse stapled to it.

You are allowed to hold the good in it and still look straight at the rest, because Scripture has never asked anybody to be dishonest in order to be grateful. Isaiah 42:7 names people sitting in darkness without one syllable of blame toward them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps clear sight from curdling into a grievance.

You have been thanking God honestly for eleven years, and nothing tonight cancels a single one of those thanksgivings. Isaiah 42:6 has Him holding a hand and opening eyes in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes gratitude and clear sight sit side by side without arguing.

The trouble with lucky is what it does structurally. It is a closing word. Nobody asks a follow-up after lucky. It is the same shape as fine and steady and it's what family does: a true thing said in a tone that means the conversation is over. And eleven years of a closed conversation is how a storeroom becomes an address.

Now, one thing said here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If where you sleep has stopped being cramped and started being unsafe, or if tonight has taken you somewhere dark, that is not a thing to carry alone on a cot at two in the morning. Tell somebody tonight. A friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you what to do about the shop. That is me refusing to leave you in that room by yourself.