A Rented Room in a City I Do Not Know

There is a kettle, a folding chair, a mattress on a frame and a chest of drawers that came with the room.

He has been here eleven months. It was supposed to be six. The job extended and he said yes because saying yes was easier than the conversation about coming home, and also because the money is genuinely good and there are people at home for whom that matters.

He knows the man at the corner store by sight. He knows two people at work well enough to ask about a weekend. That is the whole of it, and he is not complaining, because he is a grown man and he chose this.

Here is what he has not said in any phone call.

Nothing in him has moved in about seven months.

He still prays, in the sense that he says things. He reads, in the sense that his eyes go over the page. He knows all the vocabulary for what he is describing and he refuses to use most of it, because he suspects the vocabulary would make it sound like a crisis and it is not a crisis. It is flatter than that. It is a man in a rented room with a kettle, going through the ordinary motions of a faith he has not felt anything about since March.

He tried once, in April, to say something about it to his brother, and it came out as a joke, and his brother laughed, and he let it go.

The sentence, unsaid: there is nothing here to help me and I have nothing in me either.

You may know that room. No help in the surroundings, and nothing in you to make up for it.

Somebody wrote this down without fixing it first

There is a line at the end of a psalm that is remarkable mostly for what it does not do.

I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land.Psalm 143:6

Read the image. Not a thirsty man. A thirsty land. Ground, cracked open, with no water in it, which is a thing that cannot generate anything and cannot go and find anything either.

And notice that David does not explain how the ground got that way. He does not apologize for it. He does not promise to do better. He describes his own condition in the driest possible terms and then reaches out, in the same sentence, with nothing else offered.

You are allowed to describe it exactly as it is, and Psalm 143:6 has a man call his own soul a thirsty land without one word of explanation attached, and it is His Spirit who takes a line written by somebody hiding in a cave and lands it in a rented room with a folding chair in it.

The land does not water itself

Consider what the image commits to, because it is more generous than it looks.

Land is passive. That is the whole nature of the metaphor. Dry ground does not have a technique available to it. It cannot summon rain, or work harder, or dig down and find something it has been withholding. Everything that happens to a field happens from the sky.

Which means the image David reaches for is one that removes the reader from the supply side entirely, and he chooses it deliberately, and God let it stand in the book.

You are the ground and never the weather, because the written word makes the soul a thirsty land rather than a failing well, and the Spirit of God is what turns a metaphor into a place a man can actually stand in a small kitchen.

And look at the only action in the verse. I stretch forth my hands. That is it. Not a discipline. Not a routine. A man putting his hands out, which is the physical version of an open mouth, and which takes a second and can be done in any room in the world.

You have one action available and it takes a second, and Psalm 143 sets the whole human contribution at a pair of open hands, and the same Spirit who preserved that line is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one man

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Eleven months alone in a city, with two acquaintances and a corner store, and seven months of nothing moving inside, is more isolation than one person should carry without saying so, and saying so is not weakness. Tell a doctor plainly what the last seven months have been like, in those words, because a long flatness is real information and not a character report. Ask about a counselor, which is available remotely and is precisely the arrangement for somebody with no one within nine hundred miles. And call his brother back, and this time do not let it come out as a joke.

And if the flatness has begun to go somewhere heavier, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Saying it out loud is not a failure of nerve. You are held exactly as much in the month you say it as in the seven you did not, because Psalm 143:6 has a man describe his own dryness in writing with no apology anywhere in it, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that true in the body rather than only on a page.