The Room I Have to Walk Past

The back room used to be his daughter's and then it was a study for about a year and now it belongs to a man he has known since he was nineteen.

They said six months. That was two years ago, and neither of them has ever brought it up again, and that is one of the better things about the friendship. He came out of a bad year with two bags and a truck that did not start reliably, and the room was empty, and that was that.

It has been good. That is the thing worth saying before anything else. It has been genuinely good having him in the house. He fixes things without being asked. He is decent with the kids when they visit. He does the dishes with an unnecessary thoroughness that has become a family joke.

Three weeks ago he found something out about him.

And here is what a man does not expect. It is not the information that is running his days. It is the hallway.

Because that room is on the way to everything. The bathroom is past it. The linen closet is past it. If he goes to bed at a normal hour he goes past that door and there is a strip of light under it, and if he goes to bed late there is no strip of light and somehow that is worse. Four or five times a day, minimum. There is no version of living in this house that does not involve walking past that door.

And about a week ago he started going through the kitchen.

It adds maybe eleven seconds. Nobody has noticed. He has not told anybody, including his wife, that he has redesigned his route through his own home, and he could not fully explain why he is doing it if you asked him, and the fact that he cannot explain it is what has finally got his attention.

And you know that hallway. You found out about somebody you love, and the thing about them is not the thing that is exhausting you. What is exhausting you is that it is close, and it does not go away at the end of a working day, and there is no door in your own life you can shut on it.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not being left alone in this house with it. Hebrews 13:5 has God saying I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee, and the sentence in the original is built out of five separate negatives stacked so that it cannot be weakened, and the Holy Spirit is in this hallway with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

Built so it cannot be watered down

There is a promise at the end of Hebrews that is quoted constantly, and the thing worth knowing about it is how it is constructed.

Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.Hebrews 13:5

In the Greek behind that last clause there are five negatives. Five. Piled one on top of another in a way that does not translate into English at all, because English collapses double negatives into positives and Greek does not, it just gets more emphatic.

The nearest a person can get in our language is something like: I will not, not ever, no not in any way, leave you or let you go.

Nobody builds a sentence like that by accident. It is constructed by somebody who knew exactly what a person under pressure does with a promise, which is to look for the loophole. And there is no loophole in it. It was engineered specifically so that a man at eleven o'clock at night in a hallway could not find one.

You are held by a promise that was built so it could not be weakened. The written word stacks five negatives into one clause, which means the emphasis is not decoration, it is a person being deliberately and permanently cut off from any reading in which God leaves; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that construction down a hallway, past a door, four or five times a day.

And notice who it was written to. The verse before is about money and contentment, which means it was written for people worried about not having enough and about being left short. He answers a fear about lack with a promise about presence, which is either a change of subject or the deepest possible answer, and it is the second one.

The proximity is the whole problem

I want to name what is actually happening to you, because you have been trying to fix the wrong thing.

You have been trying to work out what you think about him. That is not what is grinding you down. What is grinding you down is that there is no distance available. A person can carry almost anything if they get to set it down for eight hours, and you do not. It is behind a door eleven feet from your bedroom, and every single trip to the bathroom is a small re-encounter, and you have had somewhere between eighty and a hundred of those in three weeks.

That is not weakness. That is the mathematics of proximity, and no amount of clarity about how you feel would change it.

You are not failing to cope, and there was never any distance available to cope from. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and it locates Him rather than instructing you; His Spirit does that being-near at whatever pace He keeps, and He is not scoring how many times you took the long way.

And here is the second thing, and I want to be careful with it. Nothing on this page is going to tell you what to do about the arrangement. Not that he should stay, not that he should go, not that you should say something by the weekend. That is between you and him and your wife and God, and it involves a friendship of more than thirty years that a stranger writing at a distance knows nothing about, and anybody who hands you a course of action here is being reckless with two lives.

You are not under instruction here, and no one has the standing to set your timetable. Proverbs 17:17 says a friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity, and it locates the friend in the hard season rather than telling anybody what to do in it; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has kept you civil and kind at breakfast for three weeks.

And I will say this plainly. Three weeks of redesigning your route through your own house and telling nobody is enough. Find one real person this week who does not live in that house: a pastor, a counselor, a friend from another part of your life. You do not have to name him. I found something out about somebody who lives with me and I have nowhere to put it names nobody and is enough. If the nights get darker than tired, do not wait. In the United States you can call or text 988 and a person will answer.

Eleven seconds through the kitchen

Here is what I want you to actually do with the hallway, and it is not to stop going through the kitchen.

Go through the kitchen if you need to. That is not cowardice, that is a man giving himself eleven seconds. But notice what you have been doing in those eleven seconds, which is nothing, or rather, a great deal of unstructured churning that leaves you worse off at the linen closet than you were at the kitchen door.

So put something in them. One sentence, prepared in advance, said out loud in the kitchen where the fridge is running and nobody can hear you. Not about him. About who is with you.

That is the whole change. Same route, same eleven seconds, one sentence in them instead of a churn.

You have eleven seconds and something to put in them, and that is enough for tonight. Scripture says I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee, and it is a clause that can be said out loud by a man standing in his own kitchen at eleven at night; the Holy Spirit is the one who has walked that hallway with you every single time, including the times you went the long way.

So the house is not a place where you are alone with it. It is a house you have lived in for years, with a back room in it that has been a daughter's and a study and a friend's, and a man walking through it who has never once walked it by himself.