Four Minutes in the Stairwell

He gets to his own landing and he does not open his own door.

The bag of shopping goes down against the wall first, carefully, so the bread does not fold. Then he stands. The stairwell is concrete and painted a color that was probably called something once. There is a window on the half landing below and the evening is coming up through it, warm, and lying on the third step from the bottom of his flight.

He can hear them. The television, and somebody moving about, and his daughter saying something in the tone she uses when she is telling a long story to nobody in particular.

Four minutes. Sometimes six. He has never counted them out loud and he would not use the word for what he does here, but here is what he does. He lets his shoulders down. He breathes twice. He works out, deliberately, the first thing he is going to say when the door opens, and he tries it in his head until it comes out at the right speed. He arranges his face. That is the honest description. He arranges his face into the one they know, the steady one, the one with the joke in it, and when it is on properly he picks the bag back up and puts his key in the lock.

He is not lying to them. I want to say that before anything else and I want to say it plainly. What he is doing on that landing is a kindness. There is a fourteen year old in there who does not need to carry what he is carrying. There is a woman in there who has had her own day. What he is assembling in the stairwell is not a mask over a con. It is a roof he is holding over people he loves, and holding a roof up is heavy whether or not anybody in the room can see your arms.

But there is a cost and the cost is specific, and it is not the four minutes. It is that the four minutes have no witness.

Every part of his life is watched by somebody. He is seen at work. He is seen in his own front room, where everyone brings him their questions. He is seen at his mother's on Sunday and seen in the family group chat. And there is one landing, painted a color with no name, where the actual man stands for four minutes with the bread going soft in the bag, and nobody has ever seen him there. Not once. In eleven years.

That is the thing that gets heavy. Not the performance. The unwatched part.

You may not have a stairwell. It may be the car with the engine off, or the last thirty seconds in the hall, or the bathroom with the tap running. But if you know exactly what I am describing, then you know the landing, and there is something about that landing I want you to have.

The first person in Scripture to give God a name was standing where nobody was looking

There is a moment early in Genesis that almost nobody preaches and it belongs to a woman on her own in a wilderness.

Hagar is Egyptian, a slave, pregnant, running from a household where she was not safe, and she has got as far as a spring on the road to Shur, which is a way of saying she has got as far as the middle of nowhere. Nobody is coming after her. Nobody is watching. And she is met there and spoken to by name, and afterward she says something no one in the book has said before her.

So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You are a God of seeing.Genesis 16:13

She is the first person in Scripture to give God a name. Not the patriarch. Not the priest. An Egyptian slave woman with nothing, in a place with no witnesses, who found out that the place had a witness. And the name she gives Him is not about His power or His holiness. It is about His eyes.

You are seen on that landing, in the four minutes nobody knows about. That is what Genesis 16:13 hands you and not a gentler version of it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line and puts it in a concrete stairwell where a man is standing with his shoulders coming down.

Read the second half of what she says, because it is the part that goes deepest. Truly here I have seen him who looks after me. She is not only seen. She looks back. The seeing goes both ways, and the moment it does, the wilderness stops being the place where nobody knows and starts being the place where she met Him.

You have been seen the whole time, and it is you who is seen, not the version of you that opens the door. It is written in Genesis 16:13, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that stop being an idea about God and start being a pair of eyes actually on you at half past six in the evening.

He does not need the face you put on, and He is not asking you to take it off

Now let me be careful here, because this is where people get hurt by well meaning writing.

I am not going to tell you the face is dishonest. It is not. Half of love is carrying what you can so the people you love do not have to, and if you stopped doing that tomorrow the household would not become more truthful, it would become frightened. I am also not going to tell you to go in and announce your exhaustion at the table. Who you tell, and when, and whether at all, is yours, and any writer who hands you that instruction from outside your life is guessing about people they have never met.

What I am telling you is smaller and it changes more.

The reason those four minutes are so heavy is that you have been doing them alone. Every other room in your life has somebody in it. The landing has had nobody. And Genesis 16:13 says, quietly and without any fuss, that this is not the case and has never been the case.

You were found on that landing, not caught on it. Nothing in what is written suggests God arrived at the spring to expose Hagar, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes the difference between found and caught land in the body rather than the head. He did not ask her to justify running. He asked her where she had come from and where she was going, which is what you ask someone you are walking with.

You are known by a God who required no explanation from her and requires none from you. Genesis 16:13 names Him by His seeing, and His Spirit is the One who brings that name into a stairwell with a bag of bread against the wall. He is not waiting on the other side of your door for the real version. He was standing on the third step from the bottom while the evening came up through the window.

So the face stays or goes as the days require. That was never the question. The question was whether the man who assembles it has anybody, and he does, and it turns out he always did.