The Room She Keeps Shut

The house has four bedrooms and Aoife uses two of them.

That is not unusual for a woman living alone in an old house. What is unusual is the route she takes on the landing.

The stairs come up at one end. Her room is at the other. The straightforward way is nine steps past three doors. She goes the other way, round by the bathroom, which adds about seven seconds and involves turning a corner she does not need to turn, and she has done it since the second week of January.

The door she does not pass is the small room over the porch.

I am not going to tell you what happened in January. I want to be plain about why. I was not in that house. Nobody who writes anything on the internet was in that house, or in yours. And the surest way for a woman in Aoife's position to be harmed is a stranger deciding, from a distance and with great confidence, what was in a room.

So: something happened in the second week of January, and Aoife has kept that door shut since, and she has not been in there, and she takes the long way on the landing.

She is fifty-five. She teaches piano. She bought this house at forty-one and restored most of it herself and there is not one thing in it she is not proud of.

Here is what it has cost, which is what I actually want to talk about.

She has stopped having people to stay. She had four people to stay last year and none this year, and she has said, twice, that the spare room needs doing, which is true, and which is also not why.

At Easter her brother came for the day and went upstairs to use the bathroom and Aoife stood at the bottom of the stairs with her hand on the newel post the entire time he was up there.

Here is the day it caught.

Her brother, leaving, said, "You should get somebody in to look at that damp in the little room."

And Aoife said, "Yes."

And he said, "Have you been in there recently?"

And she said, "Not lately," which is eleven months.

You know this. There is a door in your own house you are organizing around, and you have never called it that, and you have a set of small explanations that have been in service for so long you almost believe them yourself.

Far above every name that is named

Let me be exact about what I am not doing here, because this is the article where being careless would do harm.

I am not going to tell you what happened in your house. I am not going to name anything and I am not going to describe anything. I am not going to teach you a method, a prayer to walk the landing with, a thing to do at a doorway, or any procedure at all. There is a great deal of that available and I am not adding to it, and I would ask you to be careful of anybody who hands you a technique for a night they were not present at.

And I am not going to leave you more afraid than you felt when this page opened. If you finish it warier of your own upstairs, I have failed at the one thing this article is for.

What I am going to do is read you a sentence about position.

Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and hath put all things under his feet.Ephesians 1:21-22

Look at the phrase in the middle of that. Every name that is named.

Paul lists four categories, and then, because he is a careful writer and he knows a list can always be extended, he closes it off with a phrase that covers anything he did not think of. Every name that is named. In this world and in the one coming.

He is not describing anything. He does not tell the Ephesians what a principality is or what to do about a dominion. He lists, he closes the list, and then he says where Christ is relative to all of it: far above.

You are in a house where Christ is far above every name that is named, and the phrase was written specifically to cover whatever nobody thought to list. Ephesians 1:21 closes the category off deliberately, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and onto a landing in an old house.

And then verse twenty-two: hath put all things under his feet. Past tense. Done. Not a battle in progress that requires anybody's participation.

You have not been given a fight to win, and the passage is a report on a completed seating rather than a call to arms. It is written that God has put all things under His feet, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a finished thing something to stand on rather than something to accomplish.

The route is not the problem

Now here is the part I most want you to have, and it is not about the room.

The long way round the landing is not a spiritual failure. Keeping a door shut is not fear winning. I want that in whole sentences, because you have been quietly grading yourself on it since January and you have never once said the word out loud.

You are not being measured by which way you walk on your own landing, and no verse anywhere makes a person's nerve the test of anything. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an ordinary caution from being weighed as unbelief.

What has actually cost you is not the seven extra seconds. It is that nobody has stayed in eleven months.

You restored this house yourself, and every room in it is something to be proud of. And a woman who has stopped filling her own house is losing a great deal more than a small room over a porch.

And here is the specific quiet thing: standing at the bottom of the stairs with your hand on the newel post while your brother was upstairs. That is not fear of a room. That is the beginning of guarding somebody else, and that is a job that will grow if nobody takes it off you.

You have never been the one guarding this house, and the whole of Ephesians 1 is a report about somebody who is already seated over all of it. Ephesians 1:22 puts all things under His feet in the past tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a filled post an actual relief rather than a comforting idea.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. A person waking suddenly, frightened, unable to move or speak, is describing something with ordinary medical explanations that are common and well understood and treatable, and eleven months of poor sleep is a medical matter of its own. Say it plainly to a doctor this month. That is not instead of God and it is not a smaller answer. And if the year has gone somewhere darker than watchful, tell somebody this week: your brother, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is me refusing to leave you at the bottom of those stairs on your own.