The Forty First Visit

Dale has his hand flat on the door frame and he is not going in yet.

Late afternoon light is coming down the corridor from the window at the far end, laying long warm stripes across the floor tiles, and a woman in scrubs goes past him with a trolley and says all right, and he says all right back without turning his head. Room four. He knows the chart holder beside the door and the little gap where the frame has been chipped by a bed rail and the exact sound the handle makes. He has stood in this spot forty times since March.

He knows what is on the other side of it too. Marian in the bed by the window with her hair pushed flat on one side, and the smell of the hand gel, and the television on with the sound off because she likes the light of it. He knows she will ask about the dog and he will tell her the same three things about the dog, and that she will be tired by twenty past, and that somewhere near the end she will look at the ceiling and say something true and hard that he has no answer for, and he will hold her hand and not have an answer, and that will be the visit.

He is not afraid of any of it. That is not what this is.

What this is, standing out here with his hand on the frame at ten past four, is that he has run out. Not of love. There is plenty of that and it is not the thing in short supply. He has run out of whatever it is that a man walks into a room like that on. The thing that got him through visits one to about thirty. He put his hand on the frame today the way he always does and reached for it and it was not there, and now he is standing in a corridor doing the only thing left, which is nothing.

Forty visits. He could do the first one. He could do the fifteenth. He honestly does not know how he did the thirty first. And now here is the forty first, on the other side of a door he has opened forty times, and there is no version of Dale left that opens it.

A porter comes past with a bed and Dale steps back and lets it go by and then steps forward again to the same place.

Somewhere in him a voice that sounds like his own father is saying come on. He knows that voice well. It has worked for years. Today it comes up and hits nothing, the way an engine turns over and does not catch, and the silence after it is worse than the tiredness.

He looks at his own hand on the frame. He notices, without meaning to, that the other one has fallen open at his side.

What they were doing when they sang it

Exodus 15 is a song, and it matters enormously who was singing it and when.

It is sung on the far bank of the Red Sea by a crowd of people who have just walked across a seabed. Not swum. Not built anything. Not held back anything. They walked, on dry ground, between two walls of water that they did not part, away from an army they could not have fought, into a wilderness they had no supplies for. Whatever else that morning was, it was not a display of their capacity. It was a display of His, watched from close range by people who contributed footsteps.

And what they sing on the other side is this:

The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: he is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; my father's God, and I will exalt him.Exodus 15:2

That line gets printed on things. It goes on cards and gym walls and the backs of church bulletins, and printed like that it reads as encouragement, a sort of cheerful nudge to find some more. That is not what it is. It is a report from people who had none, filed on the far side of a crossing they did not perform. You are standing exactly where that sentence was first sung, which is at the end of your own capacity. The written word puts it in the mouths of people with nothing in their hands, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an ancient song and makes it a present tense fact for a man in a corridor at ten past four.

Read the grammar of it as well. The Lord is my strength. Not the Lord gives me strength, as if strength were a substance handed over at the door for you to then spend on your own. He is the strength. It is not detachable from Him and it cannot be stockpiled in you, which is why a person can walk with God for thirty years and still arrive at a door frame with empty hands. You have not lost something you were meant to keep in reserve. Scripture never describes strength as a tank a believer fills and guards, and the Holy Spirit does not treat an empty man as a lapsed one.

Supply, not stock

The chapter after the song is about food that would not keep.

They gathered it in the morning, enough for the day, and the ones who tried to hold a second day's worth back found it spoiled by morning. That is not a punishment story. It is a description of how the supply works, written down early so nobody would spend the next forty years assuming they were supposed to have built up a store by now.

There is a whole way of thinking about the Christian life that never quite recovers from missing this. It imagines a person accumulating strength, year on year, the way you might accumulate savings, so that a man at fifty who arrives at a hospital door with nothing must have been doing something wrong for the last twenty years. And then the tiredness is not just tiredness. It becomes evidence. It becomes a report on his walk with God, filed by himself, in a corridor, with no one to argue against it.

The report is false and it is worth saying so flatly. You are not looking at a deficit in your faith, you are looking at the ordinary condition of a creature on the fortieth visit. Exodus 16 puts the supply on a daily footing on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is not disappointed to meet a man on the day his own supply ran out. That is the day the arrangement was designed for.

And notice what this does to the size of the question. The question is not whether Dale can keep doing this. That question is too big to answer standing up, and it is not the one in front of him. You were given this hour, and this hour is the only one being asked of you. The written word hands out bread for a day and not for a decade, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps the frame that small when a tired mind wants to widen it to the whole road.