Her mother goes down for the afternoon at about two, and by ten past the house has gone completely quiet.
She sits on the bottom stair. Not the sofa, not the kitchen chair. The bottom stair, because it is the one place in this house that is not somebody's, and because the monitor carries from there.
There is a pile of folded washing on the step above her and she does not move it.
She prays about the thing. The same thing. She has been asking since the spring before last, and she is not vague about it either, she says it properly, and she says it the way she would say it if somebody were in the room with her.
Nothing comes back. Nothing came back yesterday either.
And here is the part she has not said out loud to anybody. When she stopped working, the phone stopped. Not all at once, and nobody was unkind about it. It went the way a tide goes, and now the calls are the surgery and the pharmacy and that is the list.
So she sits on the bottom stair in the afternoon and the thought arrives, the one she keeps refusing to finish: that God went the same way everybody else went. Quietly. Without any announcement. Because she is not out where things happen any more.
She does not believe it. She simply cannot get it to stop turning up at two o'clock.
You know that thought. You have had it on your own stair.
The ruling nobody actually handed you
Notice what has happened here, because it is worth seeing clearly. Nobody has told you anything. No one has stood in your hall and announced that God has finished with you, or that you came off the list when the wages stopped. And yet a ruling is being carried round this house, and you could very nearly quote it.
That is what a long silence does. It does not stay empty. The mind will not leave a blank where an answer should be, so it fills it, and it fills it with the worst reading available, and it fills it in your own voice, which is why it arrives sounding like something you worked out instead of something you assumed.
So hear this before another afternoon goes past. You are not disqualified. Not by the quiet, not by the years of it, not by the fact that what you do all day now shows up nowhere anybody can see. Psalm 139:8 says that if I make my bed in the lowest place there is, behold, thou art there, and that verse is not a comfort about somewhere you might get to one afternoon. It is a statement about where God already is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that line something happening on your stair rather than a sentence in a book.
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.Psalm 139:8
Behold is not a word anybody uses about a person who is on their way. It is the word you use when you look up and find someone already standing there.
Scripture keeps the record of asking that got nothing
There is a thing the Bible does that we do not do, and not doing it has cost us. It writes the unanswered prayers down and it leaves them in.
Psalm 22:2 is David saying I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent. That is in the songbook. It was set to music and sung by the whole congregation, out loud, deliberately, for centuries, and nobody tidied it. Job 23:8 has a man saying he went forward and God was not there, and backward, and could not perceive him. Isaiah 45:15 says it flat out: verily thou art a God that hidest thyself.
Not one of those men is corrected for saying it. Nobody stands over them and tells them they have missed a key or failed a test, and I am not going to tell you that either. You are in the company Scripture keeps, and the same Spirit who moved men to write those lines is the one who has kept them in the book for you to find on a stair on a Tuesday afternoon.
I am not going to explain your silence to you. I do not know what it is, and anybody who tells you what God is up to inside it is guessing with your life. What can be said is what it is not, because that part is written down.
You are held, and you have not been weighed and found short. Romans 8:38 lists everything a frightened person could think of, death and life and things present and things to come, height and depth, and then says none of it separates you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Silence is not on that list, because silence is not a separator, and the Holy Spirit in you is the seal on that today (Ephesians 1:13).
Nearness was never a wage
Underneath the first thing sits a second, and it is quieter and it does more damage. It is the arithmetic of a person who has been useful all her life. Work went in and something came back. Hours in, wages out. Effort in, results out. When the paid work stopped the arithmetic did not stop, it went looking for something else to measure, and it landed on God.
So the quiet starts to read like a balance. Nothing coming back must mean nothing going in. You must have come off the rota somewhere without being told.
That is not how a single part of this works and it never was. You have the nearness of God on the terms He set, and He set them in Christ rather than in your output. Ephesians 2:8 says it is by grace through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, and a gift with a timesheet attached to it is not a gift. His Spirit inside you is the evidence of it, and He is not waiting on you to earn Him back.
The house went quiet. The room did not go empty. Those are two different facts, and only one of them is about God.
The breakthrough here is not an answer, and I am not going to dress one up and hand it to you at the end. It is smaller and it is harder and it holds when nothing changes: you stay.
Staying is the thing. Not staying until, because until is a deal, and deals have been the trouble all along. Just staying, in the room, with the God who has said nothing, because He is God and because you are not somewhere else.
And you have the standing to stay, given in Christ and not lent to you on conditions. Hebrews 13:5 has God saying I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee, and the never in that sentence was written for exactly the stretch where nothing is being said. It is the Holy Spirit who turns it from a fine line into the reason you are still sitting on the step.
You are not waiting for God to arrive. Waiting is what a person does for somebody who is not here yet, and Psalm 139:8 settled where He is a long time before you sat down. His Spirit is in you now, in this afternoon, with the monitor hissing upstairs and absolutely nothing resolved.
Declare this over yourself
Say these sitting down, wherever you are. The right to speak like this belongs to you in Christ, and it is not issued on the strength of what you still produce. Scripture is the ground under every word of it, the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely brave, and what God does about the thing you asked for is His, whatever He does, and nothing on this page pretends to know.
- Quiet in this house, you are real and you are not a ruling. Psalm 139:8 says that where I make my bed, behold, He is there already, and behold is not a word anybody uses about a person still on his way. In the name of Jesus I name you honestly, and I am staying on this step with the One who is already sitting on it.
- Suspicion that I dropped off the list, you are finished ruling this hall. The written word says grace is the gift of God and not of works, so His nearness was never a wage and there is no rota I can be left off, and the Holy Spirit in me is the evidence of it on the afternoons I feel like nobody. I put you out today, and I am talking to Him from the bottom stair as though He were sitting on it.
- Lord, You are here in an afternoon that has told me nothing, and Psalm 139:8 settled that long before I sat down on this step. I thank You, because You have not gone the way the phone calls went, and You never once asked me to be useful in order to be near. The house went quiet and the room did not go empty, and I am staying in it.
Psalm 139:8
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