Watching the Street From the Window

The coffee went cold in his hand a while back and he has not put the mug down.

He is standing at the front window with the lamp off behind him. He did not decide to turn the lamp off. It was already off when the light went out of the sky, and he stayed where he was, and now it is a quarter to nine and the street outside is having an ordinary evening without him.

Two houses down a boy is riding a bicycle up the sidewalk and back down it, the same forty feet, over and over, standing on the pedals at the turn because that is the good part. A screen door bangs twice. A man across the way has walked his trash can to the curb and is standing beside it with his hands on his hips, talking to another man about the trash can, in no hurry at all, and one of them says something and they both laugh.

A car comes down slow, looking for a house number. In the window opposite, a television is throwing blue light across a ceiling, and somebody in there is watching a show and will watch another one after it.

Four days ago there was a conversation in a room with a clock on the wall, and since that conversation the floor of his life has not been where his feet keep expecting it.

He can hear the kettle ticking as it cools. He put it on. He does not remember putting it on.

And what he catches himself doing at the glass is arithmetic. That family gets to have a Thursday. That man gets to care about a trash can. The boy will go in when he is called and complain about dinner, and his mother will say the thing she always says, and none of them know. There is no reason they should. He is not angry at them, not exactly, and he cannot stop counting them either.

That is the part nobody warns you about. Not the news. The street.

You know this window. Maybe yours is over a kitchen sink, or a windshield in a parking lot where you have been sitting twenty minutes with the keys still in your hand. Somewhere in the last week an afternoon came and took your ground out from under you, and since then you have been watching ordinary life go past a pane of glass, doing arithmetic on people who are allowed to have a Thursday.

Hear me before anything else. This is not a failure of faith. Not the counting, not the cold coffee, not the lamp you never turned on. And I am not going to explain your afternoon to you. There is a kind of comfort that arrives holding a reason, and it is not comfort, and I do not have one for you.

I am going to stand at the window with you instead. Come on. Move over a little.

Cast is a heavier word than it sounds

The psalm this comes from was written by a man who was not composed, and I want that said before we get to the famous line at the end of it.

He says his heart is in pain inside him. He says fearfulness and trembling have come over him and the terrors of death have fallen on him (Psalm 55:4 to 5). He says he wishes somebody would hand him wings like a dove so he could fly off and rest in the wilderness, which is a grown man saying out loud that he would like to leave his own life.

And then, after all of that, he turns and says this:

Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.Psalm 55:22

Cast. That is not a delicate word. It is what a man does with a net over the side of a boat, the whole arm behind it. Not "share your burden," not "process your burden," not "manage it a little better than yesterday." A heave.

You have permission to throw this thing rather than carry it politely, and that permission is already yours at the window tonight. I am not the one issuing it: Psalm 55:22 hands it over as a command and not as a suggestion, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a written command land inside a man's chest instead of sitting on the page being true at a distance.

Notice what the psalm never does. It never informs the man that his fear was an overreaction, and nowhere does it tell him the thing is smaller than he thinks. The complaint stays in the text, permanently, with his own name on it, and the instruction comes after it rather than instead of it.

That matters at dark glass at a quarter to nine, because what people who love you keep saying is some version of try not to think about it. And then a man stands here thinking about it, and adds being bad at that to the pile.

You are not being asked to stop feeling the size of this, and you were never once asked that. The written word lets the whole complaint stand before it puts the burden anywhere at all, and the Spirit of God is called the Comforter, which is the name for somebody who comes to where the trouble is, not for somebody who explains that the trouble is not there.

Now the second half of the line, because that is the half doing the work tonight. He shall sustain thee. Sustain is not rescue. Rescue is one motion and then it is over. Sustaining is a continuing thing, a hand under the elbow that stays while the walking is still bad, for as long as the hallway is.

You are being sustained in this exact hour, and the sustaining is not waiting on you to feel sustained first. That is not my read of your evening: what is written puts the sustaining in the hands of the One the burden gets thrown at, and His Spirit is the one who works out in a man what the word already says over him.

The street is not evidence

Come back to the arithmetic, because it is the part you would be embarrassed to say out loud to anybody.

The counting is not about begrudging that boy his bicycle. Nobody stands at a window resenting a ten year old. Underneath the counting there is a sentence, and the sentence goes: everybody else is held, and I have been dropped. Four evenings of other people's ordinary going past the glass starts to look like a verdict that was read out somewhere, and the last one told was the man standing here.

You are not outside the hold because you are outside the ordinary evening, and that street is not a verdict on you. Scripture never once measures God's keeping of a man by whether his week looks like his neighbors' week, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness about whose you are, not the view through a pane of glass at night.

Think about where that line was written. A city the man wanted out of. A friend who had turned on him. Hands that were not steady.

You were not handed a psalm composed by a comfortable man, and you were not handed a God who only turns up on comfortable streets. What is written was written from inside the trouble, and the same Spirit who moved on the man writing it is standing in your dark front room right now with the lamp off.