It Comes Back Through The Paint

Eleven at night, and he is standing in the bedroom doorway with the light off, looking at the corner where the wall meets the ceiling.

It is back. Of course it is back. He wiped it in the spring with the stuff from the shop, and he painted over it in June, and by August there was a shadow coming through, and now there is a black bloom the size of a dinner plate and the paper has started to lift below it.

The cot is in the front room. It has been in the front room since the winter, next to the sofa, and the baby sleeps fine there, and neither of them says out loud that this is not what they pictured.

He has photographed it four times. He has emailed twice and rung once and been told it is logged. It is logged. That is the word.

And here is what he has not said to anybody, including her. Somewhere in the last few months he went hard. Not loud. Hard. He does not laugh at things he used to laugh at. When someone at work talked about the extension they were putting on, he said something short, and he heard himself say it, and he did not like the man saying it.

He would tell you he still loves God. He does. He prays most nights. But there is a thing in the middle of him now that has set, like something left out in the cold, and he has started to hide it the way he painted the wall.

You know this, or you would not still be reading. So we are going to go straight to it and nobody is going to be told off.

Nobody is telling you off tonight

Let me get the braced-for thing out of the way first, because it has been sitting over this page since the second paragraph. Nothing here is a correction. Scripture calls the Holy Spirit the Comforter before it ever calls Him anything sterner, and that is the order He keeps in a dark room.

I am not going to call the hardness sin. I am not going to ask you to repent of it before I will say anything kind to you. I am not going to tell you that bitterness is a root and give you a verse about it as a warning shot, which is what has been done to you before by people who meant well and had never once stood in a doorway at eleven at night looking at a wall.

What happened to you is not a character failure. It is what long pressure does to a person who has been under it while being told to keep smiling, and the fact that you noticed it and do not like it is itself the most tender thing in this flat.

So take this settled before we go any further: you are welcome here exactly as hard as you currently are. Psalm 51:17 says a broken and a contrite heart God will not despise, and the word there is about a heart that is in pieces rather than one that has been polished, and the Holy Spirit did not lead you to a page like this in order to have a go at you.

The paint was never going to hold

You already know what happens when damp is painted over. The paint is not a repair. It is a delay, and the wall comes back through it slightly worse every time, because the water was never the paint's business.

That is exactly what has been happening in you, and it is why the pleasant voice you put on at church on Sunday exhausts you by the afternoon. You have been rolling a coat over something that is coming from behind the wall, and every time it bleeds through you have decided the problem is that you did not do the coat properly.

You have not been failing at faith. You have been trying to solve a moisture problem with emulsion, which is not a spiritual failure, it is a category error, and Hebrews 4:13 says everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him with whom we have to do, which means the coat was never fooling Him for a second and He has been looking straight at the wall this whole time without one flicker of disgust. The Holy Spirit has been in that flat with you at eleven at night, on the hard nights and the very hard ones.

He is not waiting behind the paint to catch you out. He has been behind it with you.

He does the softening, and He is not waiting for an apology

Here is the sentence I most want you to have, and it is not mine.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

Read who is doing the verbs. Every single one of them is His. I will give. I will put. I will remove. There is no line in that verse where the person softens themselves first and then qualifies for the rest of it, and the people it was spoken to were nowhere near sorry when it was spoken over them.

So this is yours tonight, in the doorway, with the hardness still in you: the softening is His work and it is already under way in a man who has not apologized for anything. That is what the written word says out loud, and His Spirit is the one who put a new heart on the promise list rather than a stern talk.

You have not gone too hard for that. Stone is exactly and specifically what the verse is about, and it names the material without one word of contempt for the person carrying it.