The Step Outside the Meeting

The step is concrete and cold through his trousers and it is the best thing that has happened to him all evening.

Inside the hall the voices are still going. He can tell whose is whose without hearing a single word. His uncle's starts low and climbs. His aunt's does not climb, which is worse. Somebody laughs, once, and it is not a good laugh. The window above him is propped open with a hymn book and the sound comes out of it and lands on the step around him in pieces.

Six months. Six months of this, since his grandmother died and left one house and two families and no instructions. He is the one in the middle. Not by election. He got there the way everybody gets there: he was the one who could talk to both sides without his voice going up, so at the first meeting he was asked to sit between them, and by the third meeting nobody was asking anymore.

He is good at it. That is the trouble. He knows which word will set his uncle off and he steers around it without anybody noticing he steered. He knows the exact sentence his aunt needs to hear before she will consider anything, and he has said it, in slightly different clothes, at every meeting since March. He carries messages neither side will put in writing. He absorbs about forty percent of what gets thrown, quietly, so that only sixty percent lands.

Tonight he stood up in the middle of it and said he needed a minute, and came out here instead, and sat down on the step in the evening, and something in his chest went loose in a way that frightened him.

Nobody has asked. Not once in six months. Not his uncle, not his aunt, not his cousins who thank him afterward in the parking lot with a hand on his shoulder, meaning it, meaning it completely, and not one of them has ever said the sentence what is this costing you, because it has not occurred to any of them that it costs. He is the peace. Nobody asks the peace how it is doing.

And the thought that came out here with him and sat down beside him is not a noble thought and he would not say it inside. It is this. If I stop, they tear. And then the second half of it, arriving in the same breath, which is the part that actually scares him. And I cannot tell anymore whether that is true or whether I need it to be true.

The door will open in a minute. Somebody will come out and find him and it will be kind and it will also be a summons. He knows exactly how the rest of the evening goes.

He is still sitting down.

The hand arrives inside the slip

I am not going to start with the lift. Let me name what is actually on you first, because you will not name it and nobody in that hall is going to name it for you.

You are tired in a way that sleep does not touch. It is not the meetings themselves. It is six months of reading a room before you walk into it, of running two people's tempers at once inside your own head, of choosing every word twice before it leaves you. That is work. Real work, with a real cost. Nobody has ever costed it, and because nobody has costed it you have quietly concluded that it must not cost anything, and then you have wondered what is wrong with you that you are this empty.

Nothing is wrong with you. You have been doing a heavy thing for half a year with no place to set it down.

Here is the line I want to put under you, and I want you to hear where it sits in time.

When I thought, "My foot slips," Your mercy, O LORD, held me up.Psalm 94:18

Read the order of it. The man in that line is not standing at the edge asking to be kept from falling. He is already going. The foot has already gone out from under him and he says so, out loud, present tense, in the middle of the slide. And the holding does not arrive before the slip. It arrives inside it.

The word underneath held me up is not a rescue word. It is a propping word, the word for putting something beneath a thing that is coming down: a stake under a leaning branch, a hand under an elbow, a beam under a floor that has started to give. It does not stop the give. It goes underneath it.

You are held right now, on that step, with your foot already gone. I am not saying that to be kind to you. It is what is written in Psalm 94:18, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line and slides it under a man sitting outside a hall in the dark, at the exact moment he cannot feel anything holding at all.

And notice what the psalm does not say. It does not say I steadied myself. It does not say I remembered my training. The man contributes the sentence my foot slips and nothing else. That is his whole part in it. He says the true thing, and mercy is already underneath him, and he finds out afterward that it was.

You said the true thing tonight. You said it silently on a step and you were ashamed of it a second later, and it was still the true thing. You have somewhere for your own weight to go, and it is not the peace you have been keeping in that room. That is not my opinion of your situation. Psalm 94 promised a mercy that props up what is going down, and the Spirit of God is the One who makes a promise into a floor under a particular man on a particular evening.

Strength for the rest of tonight

Now let me be careful, because there is a move your mind is about to make and it is the wrong one.

It will hear all of that and translate it into so step back from them. I am not saying that. I would not say it. Nobody inside that hall needs you less tonight than they needed you an hour ago, and the family that made you the seam is not a family you are being asked to leave. What changes is not whether they lean. What changes is what is under you while they do.

And I am not going to hand you six more months either. I have nothing to say about the next six months. I do not know how that house gets divided and I will not pretend to. What I have for you is the rest of tonight: the walk back down the hall, the chair you sit in, the hour or so until the cars pull out of the lot. That much. Not the road. The step.

That is not me being small with you. Strength arrives in the size of the thing in front of you, and the thing in front of you is one evening.

You are being carried by the same One who is holding both sides of that family, and you were never the seam between them. His word says that He upholds all things by the word of His power, and that includes your uncle and your aunt and the house and you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a man feel the difference between being leaned on and being the ground.

You have mercy for the rest of this evening, and it is already yours before you stand up. That is Psalm 94:18 in the present tense, and it is His Spirit who carries it off the page and into a body with nothing left in it. Not mercy you have to go and earn on the way in. Mercy that is already under the step.