She Checks the Phone and Hates It

It is seven minutes past one and she is awake, and she has been awake since about half past twelve, lying on her side facing the wall doing arithmetic she does not need to do.

His phone is on the dresser, face down, on charge. There is a small light on the corner of it that comes on and goes off.

She gets up for water. That is the story she is telling herself on the way past, and she keeps telling it right up until she is standing at the dresser in the dark with the phone in her hand and the screen throwing light up onto her face.

She knows the passcode. She has always known the passcode. That was never a secret and it is not a secret now, which somehow makes it worse.

Four minutes. Messages. The one about the delivery. The group with his brother in it. A photograph of a van somebody wants him to look at.

Nothing. There is never anything.

And that is not the relief people imagine it is, because tomorrow night there will be nothing again, and nothing is not a finding, it is just the absence of one.

She puts it back. And here is the part she has never said out loud to any human being and does not intend to: she puts it back at the angle it was lying at. Slightly turned, the corner toward the lamp. She noticed the angle on the way in so that she could match it on the way out.

Then she stands there in the dark, with her water she did not want, and thinks: I have become a person who notices the angle.

He is asleep. He has done nothing. That is not the point and it has never been the point.

The point is that eleven days ago something came out about somebody else entirely. A man they both knew. Eleven years of knowing him, and it turns out there was a whole second floor in that life that nobody had ever been on, and every single person who thought they knew was reading the ground floor and calling it the house.

And ever since, she cannot make an assumption. Not about her husband. About anybody. The machinery that used to do it for her has stopped.

That is you.

Maybe it is not a phone. Maybe it is a bank statement you have started to read properly, or a story you find yourself checking against another story, or a moment at a church door when you looked at somebody's face and thought, but I looked at his face too.

You did not use to be like this. That is the part that is eating you, more than any of it.

I am not going to tell you why any of it happened. I do not know, and the people who explain these things to you are guessing. I am also not going to tell you what to do about the phone. That is not what this is, and anybody who arrives at one in the morning with instructions has misunderstood what one in the morning is.

The psalm is set in a room with liars in it

Something needs saying before the verse, because otherwise the verse sounds like it was written by somebody who had never met anyone.

Psalm 26 is not the prayer of a trusting soul in a safe village. Read a few lines up: the writer says he has not sat with vain persons, that he will not go in with dissemblers, that he has hated the congregation of evildoers. Dissemblers is exactly the right old word. It means people whose outsides were arranged.

He is writing from inside a community that had that in it. So is this.

For thy lovingkindness is before mine eyes: and I have walked in thy truth.Psalm 26:3

You are not being asked to un-know what you now know, and God has never once required anybody to be gullible on His behalf. Psalm 26 keeps the dissemblers in the room for the whole poem and never tells the writer to stop seeing them, and the Holy Spirit is named the Spirit of truth, which is not a gift that works by removing a person's eyesight.

Now look at where the lovingkindness is. Before mine eyes. Not behind them, not remembered from a better year, not filed away.

Before. In front. In the eyeline. It is a position, not a feeling.

You have something you are allowed to keep in front of you tonight that has nothing whatever to do with how much you can currently assume about anybody. The line as written puts His lovingkindness in the writer's field of view while the room stays exactly as untrustworthy as it was, and His Spirit is the one who holds a thing steady in a person's sight when their own hands are not steady.

Nothing underneath Him that is different

Here is the sentence I actually want you to have.

The horror of what came out about that man is not the wrongdoing on its own. It is the discovery that there were two of him, and that the one you knew was the one arranged for you to see.

That is the thing that has come loose in you. Not your belief in God. Your assumption that what is on the surface of a person continues all the way down.

And God has no second floor.

There is nothing underneath Him that differs from what is on top of Him. There is no arranged version. Nobody has ever got behind God and found a different God there, and no one ever will, because there is not one to find.

You are dealing with a God who is the same all the way through, and nothing about Him has been staged for your benefit. What is written pairs His lovingkindness and His truth in the same breath in Psalm 26:3, which is the whole point of the pairing, and the Holy Spirit carries the name Spirit of truth precisely because there is no second version of Him waiting to be uncovered.

You are held by God with the exact hands you had on that phone at seven minutes past one, and He did not flinch when you picked it up. Scripture never once makes His nearness conditional on the reader being a person she approves of at the time, and His Spirit was in that dark bedroom already, well before you got up for water.