The Door I Stood At

You could draw it. Right now, at whatever age you are, with a pencil and about a minute, you could get it right.

The paint was a green that had gone chalky, and there was a place near the bottom where it had chipped away to something darker underneath, and you know the exact shape of that chip. The handle was the round sort, brass gone dull, and it sat at a height that meant reaching slightly up, and you know precisely how far up, because your arm remembers it and arms do not forget.

There was a strip of light along the bottom of it, or there was not. You know which.

You know how long the hall was behind you and what the floor was. You know the sound a house makes when it is quiet, which is a particular sound and not at all the same thing as silence. You know roughly what time it was and what part of the year, and you know how long you stood there, and that number has never once been said out loud to anybody.

And the door is the whole of what you have ever given anyone. A few people have had the paint. One or two have had the handle. Nobody has had a single thing about what was on the other side of it, and nobody is going to, and you made your peace with that a long time ago, in the way a man makes peace with something he has carried so long it has taken the shape of his own back.

There is a reason it is the door you kept, and not the rest.

The door is the part that can be looked at. The door can be described with nothing happening in your chest. You can say the word green and stay in this room, in this chair, in this year.

So the door is what you kept, and it has stood in you for thirty years like a photograph of a house that nobody in your life has ever visited.

And here is the thing you have quietly assumed for the whole of that time.

That because it was never told, it was never recorded anywhere.

The record does not run on your description

I am not going to ask what was behind it. Not now, not further down this page, and not by some gentler route later on. That question is not mine and it never was, and a man who has carried a thing for thirty years does not owe an account of it to a screen.

You were seen standing there, at the actual height, in the actual hall. Isaiah 49:15 puts the memory of God beyond the reach of the deepest forgetting a human being is capable of, and the Holy Spirit was in that hallway keeping the record while a child looked at a chipped green door.

Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.Isaiah 49:15

Read what that verse does and, more importantly, what it refuses to do. It offers no explanation of anybody. It gives no account of why a person who should have come did not come. It does not stand up for them and it does not soften anything, and it does not hand you a reason to be grateful for. It goes straight past all of that. It names the worst forgetting anyone in that culture could imagine, agrees that such a thing does happen, and then says God is on the far side of it and does not move.

You have a witness who needs no statement from you. It is written that He does not forget, and forgetting is the one and only thing that could ever have left that hour uncounted, and the Spirit of God does not require a description in order to hold something.

Now, about why it was the door you kept.

That was not avoidance and it was not a failure of nerve. That was a child doing extremely competent work with the only materials in reach, building the one part of it that could be carried in daylight, and the work held for thirty years. I am not going to stand here and call it a defect now.

You were never required to become an eyewitness in order to be believed. Isaiah 49:15 makes God the one who remembers, which lifts the entire weight of the record off a child and puts it where it always belonged, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on testimony from anybody who was nine.

So now the assumption itself, said plainly, because it is the load bearing beam in the whole structure. Untold means unrecorded. If nobody heard it, then it only ever happened inside me, and if it only happened inside me then it is not a fact, it is a mood, and a mood can be argued out of existence at three in the morning by a very persuasive voice.

You have been carrying something that was already on record. It is written that He does not forget, and He needed no description of that hallway because He was standing in it, and the Spirit of God has held that hour intact for every year it has existed.

And plainly, because it belongs in the middle of this and not in small print. If any of what you carry has turned into thoughts of ending your life, or of just not being here any more, then one living person hears it out loud before tonight is over. A doctor, a friend, anyone with a pulse who will pick up. In the United States, call or text 988 and a human being answers. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line does the same work. That is not a failure of faith and it does not make anybody a burden. God puts real rescue into human hands on purpose, and reaching for one of those hands is obedience rather than defeat.