One Box, Then the Next Box

The roll of tape has been in his hand for eleven minutes and he has not used it.

He is sitting on an upturned crate in the middle of the front room with his elbows on his knees, and around him the afternoon has gone the way afternoons go in a house that is being emptied. Sixteen boxes are done and stacked by the door, labeled properly, because he labels things properly. Six flattened cartons lean against the radiator waiting to be made into boxes. The bookshelf is half empty and looks wrong, the way a half empty bookshelf always does, like a mouth with teeth missing.

The light is coming in low across the wall where the pictures were. That is the thing he cannot get past. The hooks are still in, four of them, and above each hook there is a rectangle of paint a shade darker than the rest of the wall, and those rectangles are the exact size of a life he is not finished with.

He is not slow at this. He did the kitchen in a day and a half, and the kitchen had everything in it. He did the cupboard under the stairs, which nobody does. He has been efficient about all of it, and quietly proud of being efficient about all of it, right up until he sat down on this crate to start the front room.

Because when the front room is in boxes, the room is over. That is the arithmetic he cannot make come out. Every other room was storage. This one was where things happened, and there is no version of taping it up that is only taping it up.

So the tape sits in his hand. Eleven minutes. The dog has come in twice and gone out again. Somebody upstairs has put a radio on. He can hear a neighbor's car. And he keeps doing the thing he has always done when a job is too big, which is to run the whole of it in his head from here to the end: this room, then the loft, then the garage, then the phone calls, then the day itself, and the running of it gets faster and louder until he is not sitting in an afternoon at all but in the entire remainder of the month at once, and it has all arrived on a man on a crate with a roll of tape.

And underneath that, the sentence, which is the real weight and has been all week. If I cannot get through one room, I have got nothing left.

He puts the tape down on the floor. Then he picks it up again, because putting it down feels like something he will have to explain to somebody later. Then he holds it.

The light moves off the darkest rectangle and onto the next one. He has not moved.

You know that crate. It may not be a house and it may not be an afternoon, but you know what it is to be in the middle of something at a scale you cannot hold, and to have your head run the whole of it end to end while your hands do nothing, and then to hear the quiet verdict about yourself underneath. I am not going to break it into manageable pieces for you. I want to show you the unit God is actually working in, because I do not think it is the one you have been trying to carry.

The psalm gives you a step, not a road

There is a line in Psalm 37 that people put on cards, and the card version has quietly changed what it says.

The steps of a man are established by the LORD, when he delights in his way.Psalm 37:23

Read the noun. Steps. Not journey, not plan, not the move, not the month. The Hebrew word there is a single pace, the distance between one foot going down and the other one following. It is the smallest unit of travel there is.

And read the verb. Established. The Hebrew is kun, which is what you do to a foundation: to fix, to set firm, to make ready in advance. It is used of laying a floor and of preparing a throne. The step is not merely permitted. It is prepared, and it is prepared before the foot arrives.

Put those two together and you have something very different from a card. God is not handing you the road and asking you to hold it. He is going one pace ahead and laying a floor there, and then another pace, and another, at exactly the rate a person can actually walk.

You are given a step, and the step is the entire unit God is working in this afternoon. I am not shrinking your problem to make it bearable. Psalm 37:23 puts the pace and the foundation in the same sentence on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about a walking man and lays it under somebody sitting on a crate holding tape.

Which means the running you did in your head just now, room to loft to garage to phone calls, was never something God asked you to do, and it was never something He supplied for. He did not lay a floor under the whole month. He laid one under the next pace. You went out onto ground that was not built for you to stand on, and then concluded something about your strength when it did not hold.

You have the next box, and you have it now, and nothing past it is being asked of you. That is not a coping technique. It is what the written word says about how steps get established, and it is His Spirit who makes a sentence about a pace into a floor under one specific hour.

This hour has a floor under it

I want to be exact about the size of what I am saying, because on a crate a large promise is no use at all.

I am not telling you that you have strength for the move. I am not telling you anything about the loft, the garage, or the phone calls, and I would not touch the day itself if you paid me. I am telling you that the next hour has a floor under it, that the floor was laid by God, and that the hour holds one thing and then one thing after that.

The room is not over because you tape it. I am not going to interpret this house for you, and I am not going to tell you what the rectangles on the wall are supposed to mean or what a person ought to feel about them. That is yours, and it is not the sort of thing anybody else gets to summarize. What I will say is that the hour you are sitting in is not asking you to settle it. It is asking for one box.

You are standing on a floor that was laid before your foot came down on it. Psalm 37 says the steps are established, which is the language of foundations rather than the language of effort, and the Holy Spirit is the One who does the laying in real time, in an ordinary front room, without announcing it.

And notice the second half of the verse, because it is where the burden usually gets handed back. When he delights in his way. That is not a performance clause. In the Hebrew it is the delight of the Lord that hovers over the whole line, and the older readings take it that God delights in the man's way rather than the man having to work up a feeling about it. Nothing in that verse makes the floor conditional on your mood in the fourth hour of a hard afternoon.

You were never handed the whole afternoon at once. That is what the written word describes when it measures in paces, and it is the Holy Spirit who hands out the next one at the time it is needed rather than in advance, to a man who cannot currently see past a roll of tape.