Beside Someone And Still Alone

There are nine inches between her shoulder and his, and she has measured them.

Not with a tape. With the back of her hand, moved slowly across the sheet in the dark until it found the warmth coming off him, and then stopped, because touching him would wake him and waking him would mean explaining.

He goes under in about four minutes. He always has. It used to be a joke between them, back when things were jokes between them, and now it is just a fact of the night: the breathing changes, and the room becomes hers, and she lies in it with her eyes open.

They are not in trouble. That is the part that makes this so difficult to say to anybody. There has been no affair and no shouting. He is a decent man who works nights three weeks in four and comes home gray with it. They talk. They talk about the boiler and the car and whether her mother should still be driving. It is a functioning household with two people in it who are kind to each other in the kitchen.

She just stopped telling him things at some point.

She could not tell you when. There was a run of times when she said something true and he was tired, or the football was on, or he said mm in the way that means the words arrived but nothing opened. And after enough of those, some part of her filed the true things somewhere else, and stopped bringing them out, and now there is a whole interior room in her that he has never been into.

So she lies here at half past one, nine inches from another living human being, being entirely on her own.

And the worst of it is not the loneliness. It is the guilt about the loneliness. Because who is she to be lonely. She has a husband. There are women who would give anything for a warm shoulder nine inches away, and she knows two of them, and so she has never once said this out loud, and she is not going to start tonight.

You do not have to open your eyes for the rest of this. You do not have to look at anything or find anything. Stay exactly where you are, in the dark, with the breathing going beside you, and let me talk to you.

The one place he could not think of

There is a man in the psalms who lay awake trying to think of somewhere God would not be.

He was not being clever about it. He does it like somebody genuinely searching the map. He tries the sky, right up as high as it goes. He tries the grave, right down as low as it goes. He tries the wings of the morning, which is the fastest thing he can imagine, light coming over a hill, and he rides it out to the furthest edge of the sea, and this is what he finds waiting for him at the end of the run.

If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:9 and 10

Even there.

He has one more to try, and it is the one that matters at this hour, because he goes on to say: surely the darkness will cover me. Surely the dark, at least, will be a place where I am on my own. And he finds that the night shines like the day, and that the darkness and the light are alike to God, and that the one place he was certain would be private is as lit as noon.

Now hear how that whole psalm begins, because this is the part I am really giving you tonight.

It opens with a man saying that God has searched him and known him. Known. Not observed, not monitored, not kept an eye on. Known, the way a person is known by somebody who has taken the time, who understands the thought before it is finished and the word before it is on the tongue.

That is the ache in your bed tonight. It is not really the nine inches. It is that there is a room in you nobody has been into for years, and you have started to suspect that you will go the whole way to the end without ever being fully known by anybody.

And the answer to it is not a technique. It is a Person who got there first. Before you stopped telling him things. Before the run of nights where nothing opened. Every true thing you filed away in that interior room was seen as you filed it, and none of it has ever been news to God, and none of it made Him think less of you.

Two things need saying plainly here, because I am not going to leave you with a warm feeling and a closed door.

Nothing in this message is an accusation against the person breathing beside you. He is not a villain. He is a tired man on nights, and there is every chance he has an interior room of his own that you have not been into either. What I want out of you tonight is not a verdict on him. It is the loneliness prised off the guilt, so you can carry the one without the other.

And in the morning, when the light is on and nobody is asleep, tell him one true thing. One. Not the whole room, not the years, just one. And if the two of you have been living side by side like this for a long time, there is no shame at all in sitting down with somebody who does this for a living and being helped. God puts a great deal of His comfort into human hands, and reaching for it is faith, not failure.

Tonight, though, is not for fixing any of that. Tonight you are simply going to stop being alone in this bed.

Here is what belongs to you while you lie there. You are in Christ, and Christ is in you, and that means you have the authority to speak into this room, quietly, without waking anybody. Not to command a man's heart. Never that. To speak to the dark, and to the loneliness that has been telling you a story since half past midnight, and then to the One whose right hand is already under you.