The Room You Painted and the Wait

Half past nine on a Sunday evening, and the door at the end of the landing is open about four inches, which is how it always is.

She does not go in every night. She would want that understood. Some weeks she walks past it perfectly well. But tonight she goes in, and she does the same three things she always does, which take about ninety seconds and which she has never described to anybody, including her husband, who does his own version and also says nothing.

She straightens the blanket on the end of the cot, which does not need straightening.

She turns the little lamp on and off once, because the switch is stiff and she read somewhere that stiff switches loosen with use.

And she stands with her hand on the rail for a moment and does not say anything at all.

They painted it in April. Not this April. The one before. A pale green off a card at the shop, and he did the ceiling and she did the skirting boards and they were finished by ten at night and sat on the floor with the windows open and the smell of paint everywhere, and it was one of the happiest evenings of their marriage.

Since then there have been three phone calls that came to nothing and one that came to something for eleven days and then stopped, and a great deal of paperwork, and a woman with a lanyard who was kind and had no news, twice.

What people do not understand, and what she has stopped trying to explain, is that she is not waiting for a room to be filled. She has been loving somebody for two years. She does not know their name, their age, their face or their voice. She loves them anyway, in the way you can only love someone you have made room for, and the love has nowhere at all to go, and it comes back every night at half past nine and stands at a cot rail.

I am going to stop describing her now, because I think that is your landing and your four inches of open door.

And I think you have been carrying one more thing on top of it, which is the small, unspeakable fear that all of this was foolish. That you painted a room for nobody.

What you did in April was not foolish

Let me deal with that last one first, because it is the one that keeps you up.

You painted a room for a person you have not met. Some part of you has begun to file that as embarrassing, as a thing you would not do again if you had known, as evidence of getting ahead of yourself.

Hear it said plainly by somebody standing in the doorway with you. That was not naivety. That was love doing what love does, which is to prepare a place before there is anybody in it to thank you for it. That is not my sentiment about you. Because it is written into the way God moves toward people, His Spirit had you painting in the same direction long before you noticed.

You did not put paint on a wall. You made an actual place in an actual house for somebody who currently has no place. That is the oldest shape there is. It is what God does. He does not receive people and then find room for them. The room is ready first, and it has always been ready first, and there is a reason the most comforting sentence Jesus ever said about heaven was about going ahead to get a place ready.

So no. Not foolish. You have been doing something holy at half past nine at night with a stiff lamp switch, and nobody has told you that. The Holy Spirit has been saying it over that landing for two Aprils. Here it is at last in a voice you can hear.

God setteth the solitary in families.Psalm 68:6

Sit in that sentence, because it is not a slogan and it is not a promise about your paperwork.

It says something about the character of God that will hold whatever happens next. He is against solitude. It is not what He wants for anybody. The whole direction of God, from the beginning of the book to the end of it, is people gathered into households, the alone ones set into families, tables getting longer.

Which means the thing you have wanted for two years is not something you had to talk Him into. You are not lobbying a reluctant God on behalf of a child. You want what He wants, and you have wanted it in the same direction as Him since the April you opened the tin. The Spirit who set the wanting in you is the Spirit who wrote Psalm 68:6. That verse is His own stated position, not a concession to yours.

Now I have to be honest with you, because you have had enough people be encouraging at you.

I cannot tell you that the phone rings. I do not know, nobody knows, and anybody who tells you a date is spending your heart on a guess. There is a person at the other end of this with a story and a will and a whole set of people around them, and none of that is mine to promise away.

What I can tell you is where you are allowed to stand while it is unresolved. That ground is written, not borrowed from me, and the Spirit of God is what makes it bear weight on a landing at half past nine.