Waking In A Quiet House

She takes down two mugs, and she is halfway through filling the second one before she remembers.

The kettle is the loudest thing in this house now. It used to be the third loudest, behind the small one who sang everything he said instead of saying it, and the bigger one who came down the stairs like a dropped sack of coal. Her daughter and the two boys lived here three years and four months. In March they took a hired van and a folded cot and a carrier bag of odd shoes three hundred miles north, because that is where the work was, and it was the right thing, and she told them so, and she meant every word of it, and she stood on the step and waved until the van turned at the postbox.

Then she came back in and shut the front door, and the house made a sound she had forgotten it could make.

Now the mornings are long in a way mornings have no business being. She is awake at ten past five with nothing waiting for her. The stair carpet has stopped wearing thin in the middle. There are three pencil marks on the kitchen door frame and she has been cleaning around them for five months rather than over them. The radio goes on before her feet touch the floor, because quiet at that hour is not rest, it is a room with something missing out of it, and the radio is a way of not hearing that.

She pours the second mug down the sink, quickly, the way you do a thing you would rather nobody had witnessed.

Then she stands at the window with the first mug going cold in her hands and says out loud, to nobody: well. Here we are, then.

That is the whole of her morning prayer most days. Well. Here we are, then.

Now stand at that window yourself, because I think you are already standing there. It may not be a daughter and two boys. It may be a husband, or the last child, or the one who used to ring at seven, or a person who left in a way you do not talk about at church. Whoever it was, the house has been keeping a different kind of quiet since, and you have been getting up into it every single morning, and no one has once asked you what that is like.

The first voice in the house

Here is the thing about a quiet house. The quiet does not stay quiet. It talks.

It gets the first word every morning, before you are awake enough to answer it, and it always says the same sentence: there is nothing here now. And because you heard it lying down, half in a dream, with no defense up at all, you believe it the way you believe the weather. It is not an argument. It is just the shape the day arrives in.

So the day starts with a verdict on your house, delivered by your house, and you spend the rest of the day underneath it.

I want that first word taken back. Not by pretending. By speaking.

Listen to a man who woke in a hard place and knew exactly what to do about the first hour.

Let me hear of Your faithful love in the morning, for in You I trust. Make known to me the way in which I should walk, for to You I lift up my life.Psalm 143:8

He is not describing his feelings. He is asking to hear something, and he is asking at a particular hour, and he says which one. Morning. He knows what you know, that whatever gets said first tends to hold the ground all day, and he refuses to leave that hour to the silence and the accusation and the long list.

And notice what he does not do. He does not tell God how long he has waited or set Him a date. He lifts his life up, hands raised, the way you lift a child to somebody taller so they can see over the crowd.

Now here is what belongs to you in this, and it is more than you have been using.

You are in Christ, and Christ is in you, and that is not a poem. It means the authority to speak to your own morning has been handed to you the way keys are handed to somebody trusted with the house. You do not have to work it up. You do not have to feel it first. A key does not care how the hand holding it feels; it turns because it fits the lock, and this lock was cut by God before you got here.

Faith the size of a mustard seed, said the Lord, spoken to the mountain. Not felt about the mountain. Spoken to it. So the mountain in this kitchen is not your daughter and it is not the three hundred miles. The mountain is the sentence the quiet says to you at ten past five, and you have every right to open your mouth and answer it.

And let me name the ache under it plainly, because you have been carrying it without a name.

You do not only miss them. You miss being in the middle of something. You miss being needed at a specific hour by a specific person who could not do it without you. There was a shape to your day that other people made, and when they went they took the shape with them and left you the hours. That is a real loss and it deserves better than being called stress, and you are allowed to say it out loud to God this morning without one word of apology for it.

They were meant to go. That is the strange, hard mercy in it. Love that raises people well raises them to leave, and the emptiness in your hallway is partly the proof that you did it right. That does not make it hurt less. It just means the hurt is not a failure, and neither are you.

One more thing, and then we will speak. There is no clock on this. If you come to it at four in the afternoon, still in yesterday's cardigan, you have taken it. The bread came down fresh every morning in the wilderness and could not be stored up, and nobody was ever docked for gathering late. Today's portion is today's. You are not behind, and there is no streak here to break.