The Room He Has Not Cleared Yet

The room has a bed frame in it with no mattress, four boxes of things that belong to nobody, and a wardrobe with one door that swings open on its own if you close it too fast.

His sister asked him at the end of a phone call in February, in the tone people use when the real question comes at the end. Have you thought about the back room.

He said he had. He had not. He has now thought about it for six months in the way a person thinks about something they cannot look at directly, which is constantly and never once all the way through.

His mother is not in crisis. That is what makes it hard. Nobody is forcing anything and there is no deadline, and so the decision sits there being available every day and never being made. If she were in hospital tomorrow it would decide itself and part of him has noticed that he half wants that, which is a thought he has not said out loud to anybody and which sits in him badly.

And the actual sticking point is not the room, or the money, or the logistics, all of which he could work out in an afternoon. It is that he cannot find anywhere to stand while he thinks about it. Every place he tries to think from moves. From his mother's side it looks one way. From his wife's face at dinner it looks another. From the version of himself at sixty looking back, another again.

Anyone with a decision that will not resolve knows this exactly. I am not going to tell anybody what to do about their mother. I have no business doing that and I would be a fool to try from here. What I want is to talk about the ground he is deciding from.

The voice is behind, and it comes while walking

Let me put down a line and notice where the speaker is standing.

And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.Isaiah 30:21

Behind thee. Not in front. Isaiah does not describe a map handed over before departure. He describes a voice that comes from behind a person who is already moving, and specifically at the moment of turning.

That is a completely different arrangement from the one most of us are trying to operate. We want the answer before the step. Isaiah describes the word arriving at the point of the turn, to somebody who has already started walking, which means the walking is not the reward for having got it right. It is the condition under which the voice is described as speaking at all.

You are guided, and the guiding comes to a person in motion rather than to a person waiting for certainty. That is not a soft word for a man in a doorway. It is what is written in Isaiah 30, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and puts it under somebody standing in a back room. The decision is a decision. The guiding is God's.

And notice what the voice says. This is the way, walk ye in it. Six words. It is not an explanation, it is not a rationale, and it does not include the reasons.

You have never been promised the reasoning, and the absence of it has never meant the absence of guidance. Isaiah 30:21 is the text this sits on, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old prophet land in a room with a bed frame in it.

Hesitation is not faithlessness

Now the part this category exists for, and it comes before everything else.

Six months of not deciding is not disobedience. I want that said flatly, because somewhere in this man's head is a voice suggesting that a person of real faith would have decided by now, and that voice is wrong and it is doing damage.

Some decisions are genuinely hard. This one involves a mother, a marriage, a house and a version of the next fifteen years, and the fact that a man has not resolved it in an afternoon is evidence that he is taking it seriously rather than evidence that he is weak.

I am also not going to tell him what to decide, and I want to say that plainly too. Not a hint, not a lean, not a story with an obvious moral. I do not know his mother, his wife, his marriage, his back or his finances. Anybody who tells a stranger what to do about their parent from a distance is not helping them, they are relieving their own discomfort.

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.Philippians 4:6-7

Notice what that peace is described as doing. Keeping, which is a garrison word. Not resolving the situation. Standing guard over a mind while the situation is unresolved.

You were offered a garrison rather than an answer, and the garrison arrives before the decision does. Philippians 4:7 is where the word puts it, and His Spirit is the one who lets a man be guarded in the middle of something he has not worked out.

You are settled right now, in a room you have not cleared, with the question exactly as open as it was in February. It is written that the word comes behind a person who walks and that the peace of God garrisons the heart, and it is the Spirit who makes that true in a man who half wants an emergency to decide it for him.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question for you or for your mother, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and talk to a doctor, a counselor or a social worker about what is actually being asked of everybody. Decisions like this one are usually made better with a real person in the room, and being settled in God has never been a reason to make it alone.