I Have Been Going Upstairs for Two Years

Half past eight. You could not tell anybody when it started and you know exactly what month it was.

You say something about being tired, which is true, or about a bath, which is usually not. And you go up. And the light on the stairs is the one with the bulb that has needed changing since before all this, which is a detail you find funny in a way you could not explain.

Two years, near enough. Not every night. Enough nights that it is what happens.

You are not depressed in the way people mean it. You have thought about that carefully and you would say if you were, and you have a doctor you like and you would go.

You are just tired in a way that a room full of people costs something, and upstairs there is nobody to be anything for.

What happened on Tuesday is that your daughter, who is twenty-two and back for a bit, said something completely without weight while she was looking for a charger. She said: shall we watch the thing now, or after you go up?

After you go up.

She was not being pointed. She has never once been pointed about it. It was scheduling.

And you sat there afterward and understood that the evening in this house now has two parts, before and after, and that the boundary between them is you, and that everybody has known this for a long time and has been perfectly nice about it.

He said habitation, which is a place

Sit there a minute. It is only twenty past. I am not going to tell you to stay downstairs tonight.

You are permitted to speak over a room you are about to walk out of, and nothing in that promise ever required you to stay in it. That is what is written, and every single noun in it is a place, and the Spirit is the one who stays in a room after the person who spoke has gone up the stairs.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit is not going to convict a tired woman for being tired: going upstairs is not a sin and it is not a failure of love and it is not something to be corrected. A person who has run out and takes themselves somewhere quiet is doing something sensible. Nobody in this house is on trial. Not your daughter, who asked a scheduling question, and not you.

And nobody else is in scope here. Not one word of this is about what anybody else does in that front room. Your own mouth is the only thing in this article.

Now come and look at a promise about where God's people live, and look at the noun He uses.

And my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.Isaiah 32:18

Three phrases, and every one of them is a place. Habitation. Dwellings. Resting places. Not three states of mind. Not three descriptions of how a person feels about their circumstances.

God is talking about rooms.

And that is worth sitting with, because you have been treating the problem as one located in you: your tiredness, your capacity, how much a room full of people costs. All real. But the promise is not aimed at your capacity. It is aimed at the place.

God speaks over rooms, and He has said what He intends His people's rooms to be, and a front room at half past eight is one of them. That is not me making something of a tired evening. That is what is written, and which nouns Isaiah uses, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a sofa at twenty past eight.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing a room you are leaving. When you speak over that front room, you are not committing to stay in it. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He does not require you to be there for the rest of the evening in order to come through.

A blessing spoken in that doorway is not a promise to be different tomorrow. Scripture says peace be to this house, which Christ told His people to say and then go on their way (Luke 10:5), and the whole instruction was about a word spoken on the way through, and the Spirit is the one who carries it after the speaker has gone.

What the two parts of the evening are

Now let me name it, because what you understood on Tuesday was accurate and it deserves to be handled properly and not turned into guilt.

What is written has never once called a tired woman a shape, and the Spirit is not weighing your evenings. The evening has two parts and you are the boundary. That is true. But look at what it actually means: it means your presence in a room registers. A house does not arrange itself around a person who does not matter to it. The schedule exists because you are the fixed point of it.

That is the opposite of what a tired woman on a sofa at twenty past eight normally concludes at that moment.

And the second thing, which matters more: nobody in this house has treated your going up as a problem. Two years, and a twenty-two year old asked about it the way you would ask about a train time. That is a household that has absorbed something without resentment, which is not nothing and is not common.

That is not me finding a bright side. It is what is actually in the information from Tuesday, and what is written never once required you to have more capacity before a room could be blessed, and the Spirit is not standing on those stairs with a tally of your evenings.

God is not asking you to become a woman with more in her, and He has never made your energy the condition of His peace resting on a room. It is written that not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts (Zechariah 4:6), which is God ruling out capacity as the mechanism, in writing and in advance, and the same Spirit who breathed that is in this front room now.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to stay down until ten, or to push through, or that the evenings will change if you say this, and if any of this reads as a plan to make you more available, it has gone wrong. I have no authority to promise you an atmosphere in exchange for a sentence.

What I can put in your hands is this: the room you leave can have something said over it on the way out, and that costs you nothing you have not got at half past eight. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and twelve words in a doorway on the way to the stairs is not a smaller thing than an hour on a sofa.