The Drive Home From The Ward

Eleven days in, and the drive home has a shape to it.

She knows which elevator comes fastest, and that the machine on four takes crumpled bills and the one on two spits them back. She knows that leaving the floor at ten past eight catches the light at the bottom of the hill on green, and she has started to care about that light more than a grown woman ought to.

Tonight she does the whole thing from the outside of herself. Signs the book at the desk. Nods at the man running the floor polisher, who nods back, because eleven days makes two people regulars. Shoulders the heavy door open because both hands are full: her coat, and a small plastic bag from the nurses' station with her mother's rings in it, taken off for the scan on Tuesday and nobody has said when they go back on.

The drive is nine miles. Radio on, radio off again at the second commercial. There is a stretch past the feed store where the road opens up and you can see clear to the ridge, the best thing in any day she has, and tonight she goes right by without looking.

Then her own street, her own driveway, and the porch light she left burning this morning because she knew what time she would be coming back to a dark house.

It does not land at the hospital. All day on that floor, with the beeping and the cuff and the lady in the next bed who wants to talk, she is fine. She is competent. She asks good questions and writes the answers on an envelope.

It lands here. In her own hallway. Key still in her hand, coat still on, the little bag of rings set down on the hall table, and something comes over her the way a second coat goes on over the first. Heavier in this house than it ever was in that ward. Twenty to nine, standing on her own rug, and she cannot get her feet to carry her into her own kitchen.

That is you, standing in your own hallway with your coat still on.

Maybe it is not a ward. Maybe it is a unit with a keypad on the door, or a room at the end of a hall with your father in it. The details move around. The doorway does not. Something rides home with you, and it does not get out of the car when you do. It follows you in, sits down in your front room, and makes itself comfortable in a house you pay for.

And before another word: this is not a failure of faith. Eleven evenings under fluorescent light beside somebody you love is loving a person at close range, and love at close range is not free to carry. Heavy is not faithless. Nobody in heaven is shaking their head at you at twenty to nine.

What actually rides home with you

I want to put this on a scale. It is the only honest way anybody talks about weight.

Paul is writing to people worn down in ways we would call medical and ways we would call cruel. He never tells them it is nothing. Watch what he does.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.2 Corinthians 4:16-17

He weighs it. That is the whole move, and it is a steward's move: he sets what is happening on one side of the scale and something else on the other, and never once pretends the first side is empty. Our outward man perish. He simply refuses to weigh it by itself.

And notice which side of that scale gets the word weight. Not the ward. The glory. The heaviest thing in the verse is the good.

So here is what that means in a hallway at twenty to nine. You are not the one holding those two sides apart, and you never have been. It is written into the verse itself: the affliction is what worketh the glory, so the weight you carried out of that ward tonight is being worked by God on the far side of the scale, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work while you stand on your own rug with nothing left to give.

The inward man is renewed day by day. Day by day. Not at the end of all this. Not when the scan comes back. You have a renewing going on in you tonight that you did not start and cannot feel, His word puts it on a daily schedule, and it is His Spirit who does the renewing rather than your reserves, which went into that plastic bag along with the rings.

I am not going to tell you your house has something in it. I do not do that, and a tired woman does not need a stranger putting things into her own rooms.

The ward is where you perform. The hallway is where you stop. All day you play the competent one with the questions and the envelope, holding a thing down with both hands without once noticing it. Then the door shuts, there is nobody left to be competent for, and what you held down comes up. That is not weakness arriving. That is your grip opening.

So hear this over your own front door. This house is His and you are His inside it, sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, and Ephesians 1:13 says that sealing was done to you and not by you. It came in through that door with you tonight, still on you, under the coat.

And there is nothing here to perform correctly. No order of words, no doorway to walk through twice, nothing that only counts if you do it right.

You were carried through every one of those drives home, whether the ridge got looked at or not, and you are carried standing there now. That is the renewing the word puts on a daily schedule, and it is His Spirit who kept it up on the days you had nothing to put into it.