Fifty Years, and Now a Rented Room

Fifty-one years, if you want to be exact about it, and she does, because she was there for all of them. She came into that house at twenty-three with a husband and a set of saucepans and no idea what she was doing, and she came out of it at seventy-four on a Tuesday in March with four suitcases and a box she has not opened.

It is not a tragedy. She would want that said. Nobody did anything wrong. The stairs got difficult, and then the bathroom got difficult, and then there was a winter where the heating went and the whole thing became an argument nobody could win. Her son handled it well. The room she is in now is bright and clean and there are people down the hall and somebody makes lunch.

And she has been in it four months and has not opened the box.

She knows what is in it. Photographs mostly, and the good tablecloth, and a set of small things that will not mean anything to anybody after her. That is not why the box is closed. The box is closed because opening it would mean putting things somewhere, and putting things somewhere would mean this is where they go now, and she is not ready to agree to that in a room with a number on the door.

A great many people are somewhere on that road, and most of them are not seventy-four. Anybody who has been moved out of the place their whole life happened in knows what an unopened box is doing in the corner. I am not going to tell anybody this room becomes home if they just try. That is not how it works and saying it would be an insult. What I want is to talk to the woman in the chair.

Cast, not carry better

I want to put one line down and then look at the verb in it, because almost everybody hears this verse as advice about attitude and it is not.

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

Cast. Not manage. Not carry more cheerfully. Not put in perspective. The word is the one you would use for throwing something off a wall, and what follows it is not a promise that the load gets lighter. It is a promise that a person gets sustained, which is a completely different claim and a much better one.

And look at the last clause. He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved. That word for moved is the same word the psalms use over and over for a thing being shaken loose from its footing. It does not mean the house stays. It means the person does not come off her foundation, and those are two separate matters, and this psalm knows the difference even if everybody who quotes it does not.

You are held, and the holding is done by the Lord rather than by the address you kept for fifty-one years. That is not a pat thing to say to a woman in a rented room. It is what is written in Psalm 55, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and puts it under somebody at four in the afternoon with a box in the corner. The house is sold. You are not.

There is something else worth knowing about that psalm, and it changes how it lands. David wrote it while he was leaving Jerusalem in a hurry, on foot, with his head covered, because his own son had taken the city. He is not writing from a chair. He is writing while he is being moved out of the place his whole life happened in.

You have a psalm written by somebody who was walking out of his own city, and it was never a poem about coping well. Psalm 55 is the written word for it, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old man's bad week land in a bright room with a quilt on the chair.

The box is not a failure

Now the tender part, and I want to say it in the plainest words I have, because plain is what this deserves.

That box is not stubbornness and it is not a lack of faith. It is grief, and grief has its own timetable, and nobody, including a person writing an article, gets to set it for anybody else. A woman who has lost a house is not a woman who has failed to adjust. She is a woman who has lost a house, and the loss is real, and the fact that it was necessary does not make it smaller.

I want to say something about what she has actually lost, because I think it has been slightly misnamed by everybody around her, kindly and wrongly.

She has not only lost a building. She has lost the place where all of it is stored. Fifty-one years of the ordinary happened in those rooms, and the rooms were doing a job: they were holding the memory in place. You walked past the hall cupboard and remembered a Christmas. Now the cupboard is somebody else's and the memories have nothing to hang on, and that is a real and specific bereavement that almost nobody names.

Even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Four verbs and every one of them is His. Made, borne, carried, delivered. And it is spoken over the oldest people in the room on purpose.

You were carried through all fifty-one of those years and you are being carried through this one. Isaiah 46:4 is the line it rests on, and it is His Spirit who takes an old promise and settles it into a body that is tired in a way sleep does not fix.

You have not been moved off your foundation, whatever has happened to the house that stood on it. Psalm 55:22 says He sustains and does not let the righteous be moved, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that difference real to a person rather than clever.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the truth about the afternoons. Being sustained by God has never been a reason for anybody to sit alone with something that needs a real person in the room.