The Window I Stopped Looking At

The lift doors open on the fourth floor and the lights come on in halves, the way they always do, the far end waking up a beat after the near end.

She parks the trolley by the pillar and starts at the window side, because she has always started at the window side. Cloth, then bins, then the floor on the way back.

A jumper has been over the back of the same chair since before Easter. A tin of biscuits somebody brought back from somewhere has three left in it. A birthday card is still standing up on a monitor stand a week after the birthday.

She pulls the liner out of a bin with most of a lunch still in it, and while she is doing that a sentence goes through her, flat and quiet and entirely familiar: I do not think You are going to do anything.

It does not shock her because it is new. It shocks her because she catches, in that second, that it has been going round for the better part of two years, and she has never once said it out loud, not to God, not to anybody.

Her hands are still gentle with the work. She still straightens the chairs. Something behind the hands has gone hard, and she does not much like who she is turning into, and there is no one on this floor to mention it to.

Behind her the whole east wall is glass, and out there the sky over the roofs is doing the thing it does at this hour, going from gray to a color with no one watching. She used to stand with the mop and look at it. She could not tell you when she stopped.

And you know that too, or you would not have opened this.

Nobody is getting told off in this one

Let me say what this article is not, before your guard goes up, because it will have gone up already and I do not blame it.

I am not going to correct you. I am not going to call the hardness a sin, or ask you to repent of it first so that the rest of the page can be released to you, or explain that bitterness is a root, or do any of the things that have been done to people in your position by people in mine.

You are being met this morning, right now, exactly as hard as you actually are, and nothing kind on this page is being held back until you soften. That is not my policy. That is how God has demonstrably handled it in His own book, and the Holy Spirit has kept those pages in the Bible for two and a half thousand years for readers who arrive in precisely your condition (Job 7:11).

You do not have to be sorry before you keep reading.

What Scripture actually does with a bitter sentence

Here is the thing that ought to be far better known than it is.

There is a man in the Bible who said this: I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul (Job 7:11). He said harder things than that afterwards. He accused God of watching him and not letting up. He said he was sick of his own life and he did not soften a syllable of it.

His friends corrected him at length, in beautiful language, with a great deal of accurate theology.

And at the end of the book God turns and speaks, and He does not turn to Job. He turns to the friends, and He tells them that they have not spoken of Him what is right, as His servant Job has (Job 42:7).

Read that until it goes in. The man who said the bitter thing out loud is the one God endorsed. The men who corrected him for it are the ones He did not.

There is a woman a few books further on who came home empty and told the whole town not to call her by her name any more, because the Almighty had dealt very bitterly with her (Ruth 1:20). Nobody in the text rebukes her. God does not appear in a cloud to have a word about her attitude. Her line stands in the record exactly as she said it.

So you are in company that God Himself has never once told off, and you have His written word for that and not my opinion, and it is His Spirit who put those particular sentences where a person like you would find them.

He is doing the softening, and He is not waiting on an apology

Now I want to be careful here, because this is where an article like this usually turns into homework.

I am not going to tell you to soften your heart. It is not your verb. Look at how God says it: I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). Every active word in that sentence belongs to Him. There is nothing in it for you to perform, and no condition on the front of it, and no clause about how you got the stone in the first place.

You have a God who is already at work on the hardest thing in you, and He began before you noticed and without asking you to account for yourself first. That is not a hopeful thought I am extending. It is the written promise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it out in an actual person on an actual floor, quietly, over time, which is the only way that kind of work has ever been done.

Nobody is asking you to apologize for how it got hard. The years did that. Doing the same thing before daylight for a long time with nothing giving does that to people, and it does it to good ones as readily as anyone.

A thing kept off the books does not go away

I have spent my working life around ledgers, and there is one rule under all of them: an entry you leave off does not stop existing. It just stops being counted, and it goes on quietly affecting everything while nobody can see it.

That is the actual trouble with your sentence. Not that you think it. That it has never once been out of your mouth.

Kept in, it ferments, and slowly it stops being a feeling about a situation and becomes a settled position about God. Two years of that and a person has filed a conclusion they never meant to reach.

Said out loud, to Him, the same sentence is a prayer. Not a nice one, not a well-worded one. A prayer, of the kind that is all over the Psalms and the whole of the book of Job.

You have the standing to say it to Him, given to you in Christ and not issued on how you feel this morning, and the Holy Spirit is not flinching at the back of the room while you do. Scripture invites the pouring out of a heart before Him without a word about the state of the heart being poured (Psalm 62:8).