Back Against the Bathroom Door

The shower has been running for eleven minutes and she has not been in it.

She is on the floor with her back against the door and her knees up, the towel still folded under one arm because she meant to use it and then did not. Steam is coming over the curtain rail. On the other side of the door somebody is doing the dishes badly, plates knocking together, and somebody else is telling a story that keeps getting interrupted by laughing.

She said she was going for a shower. That was the sentence she used, and it was a good sentence, and it worked.

What she is actually doing is breathing. That is the whole activity. Her chest is going quick and shallow and too high, and every time she thinks she has it there is another one, and the water is running so that nobody out there counts them. One hand is flat on the cold tile beside her hip. She keeps it there because the tile is the only thing in the room telling the truth: this floor is not moving, and she cannot feel that anywhere else.

Eleven days ago she sat in a small room and a kind person told her something, and she said thank you, and she drove home, and she cannot remember one thing about the drive. Not one intersection. Not the radio.

Since then she has been at work every day. She has been funny at work. Somebody said last week that she seemed on good form.

A housemate knocks and asks if there is any hot left, and she says loads, sorry, two minutes, in a voice that comes out completely normal, and the horror of that is a thing all its own: that the voice still works. The voice would work at a funeral.

She looks at the door she is leaning on and thinks, very clearly, I do not know how to be a person tomorrow.

That is you.

Maybe it is not the bathroom. Maybe it is the car with the engine off, or the far end of the parking lot, or a stairwell. Somewhere with a door that shuts and a noise that covers you. Whatever sat you down there was real. The ground you had genuinely moved, and I am not opening this by telling you it is smaller than it is.

I am also not going to tell you what it is for. I do not know, and nobody honest does. Anyone who hurried in with a reason handed you something they made up, and you can leave it on the mat.

And this, before anything else: the breathing on that floor is not a failure of faith. It is not a verdict on you, or on your prayers, or on how much of the Bible you have read. It is what a body does eleven days after the ground goes.

Every Load Bearing Word Is Outside the Man

Psalm 18 comes out of a man who has just finished a long stretch of being hunted, and the first thing he says is not a description of his own state. It is a list of things standing somewhere apart from him.

The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.Psalm 18:2

Read it again and notice what is missing. There is nothing in it about how David is doing. Not a word about his composure, his breathing, or how well he held himself together in the cave. Every item is a thing with weight standing outside him. A man says my rock the way he says my house: it is his to run into, not his because he built it.

You are held tonight by something that is not your composure. That is not my encouragement to you: it is what is written, because the psalm puts every load bearing noun outside the man and never asks him to be steady first, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an outside thing true inside a person, rather than the amount of calm she can scrape together on a bathroom tile.

There is a reason he reaches for a tower. A high tower is not a mood. It is a building, and a person goes into it at whatever speed she arrives.

You have already run somewhere tonight, and the running was not cowardice. His word gives the tower to whoever runs into it, not to whoever holds the field (Proverbs 18:10), and the Spirit of God carries that straight past a woman's own low opinion of herself at ten past ten at night. Scripture is relaxed about people who arrive at God in a state.

David also says in this same song what it was like before any rescue: sorrows compassing him, floods making him afraid. Afraid. It is in the lyric, and nobody edited it out to make him look better.

You were not disqualified by anything your chest did on that floor. In Psalm 18:6 the man calls out in distress rather than in confidence, and the answer comes to the distress, and the Holy Spirit is not standing outside this bathroom waiting for your breathing to settle before He will come in. He has never once been embarrassed by you.

Why the Water Is Running

You put the shower on so nobody would hear. Two things about that, and neither is a rebuke.

The first is that hiding runs all through the Bible and God does not treat it as failure. David wrote from caves. Elijah went under a tree and asked to die, and was fed and let sleep, twice, before anybody said a word to him about anything. No verse says fall apart in public or it does not count.

You have permission for the closed door, and what happens behind it is not a lesser kind of prayer. Jesus tells people to go into a room and shut the door and pray to the Father who is in secret (Matthew 6:6), so the shut door is His idea, and the Spirit who searches the deep things is already on your side of it, doing the interceding you cannot get into words while your breathing is like that.

The second thing is gentler. The water cannot run every night and it should not have to. Somewhere ahead of you is a person who gets told. Not tonight, necessarily. But a door is a shelter and not a residence.

You were never going to have to carry this alone to prove something. Nowhere in the written word is solitary endurance the price of being helped, and the Spirit is called the Comforter because comfort is a thing brought to a person, not a thing she generates on a mat with both hands over her mouth.

You were held through all eleven of those days, including the ones you cannot account for. Psalm 18:16 says He sent from above, He took me, He drew me out of many waters. Every verb belongs to God, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that weight bearing rather than merely admirable. You do not remember the drive home. He does.