Short Enough To Hold In One Hand

The water has gone from hot to warm to that temperature where a child stops noticing and an adult starts noticing for both of them.

There is a plastic duck with a chipped beak wedged behind the faucet, where it lives. The towel is over the radiator getting warm, which is the only part of this whole operation the child actually cares about. Condensation has made the tile go soft and gray, and someone has drawn a line through it with a finger and the line is beading and running down.

She is kneeling on a bath mat with her sleeves pushed up, and she has one hand cupped over the small forehead so the rinse water goes backward and not into the eyes, because that is the war and she intends to win it.

And the child says, in the way children ask questions, meaning nothing and meaning everything and mostly wanting to keep the bath going a bit longer: what do you believe?

She laughs. She says, well.

Then she stops laughing, because it turns out she is going to answer it.

She holds up a hand with the water running off it and she starts counting. One. Two. Three. Four.

And she stops.

She looks at the four fingers standing up in the steam and she waits for a fifth to come, and it does not come, and she becomes aware of her own heartbeat in a way you do not usually become aware of it while washing a child's hair.

Four. That is what is left. Four things she would put her whole weight on without checking. A decade ago she could have gone for an hour, with subheadings, and now there are four, and she is forty three years old and kneeling on a wet mat holding up a hand like somebody ordering at a counter.

The child looks at the four fingers. Considers them. Accepts them entirely, in about a second and a half, the way you accept that a road is a road.

Then: can I have the duck.

She hands over the duck. The water goes another degree cooler. The towel is warm on the radiator and the ceiling fan is going and nothing in the room has changed at all, except that she has just said out loud, to the only person who asked, the four things that hold her up, and the ceiling did not come down.

Short is not the same as thin

There are two different things that can happen to a list, and they get mistaken for each other constantly.

One is a list that has been hollowed out. Nothing was ever really under it, so when the weather came the whole thing folded and there is nothing left because there was nothing there.

The other is a list that has been walked on. Somebody tested every line by putting real weight on it, and the ones that could not carry weight came away, and what is left is short because it is the part that held.

Those two lists look identical on paper. They are opposites. And you have been treating yours like the first one when the whole story of the last few years says it is the second.

You are carrying a load bearing faith right now, in four lines or three or however many you counted with water running off your hand. That is not my encouragement, it is the ground Scripture stands on when Ephesians 4:5 says one Lord, one faith, and the Holy Spirit wrote that sentence short on purpose and has been holding it under you ever since.

"One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all."Ephesians 4:5-6, KJV

Look at what Paul is doing there, because it is not what we would do. He is writing to hold a whole body of people together, which is the exact situation where a person reaches for a long document. He does not reach for one. He puts down a few clauses and lets them carry the weight of the entire chapter.

And I want to be careful, because it would be easy to slide from that into handing you a list, and that is not happening on this page. Paul was not writing your four. Your four are yours, tested by your own weather, and nobody else gets to write them, including me.

What is written there does not attach a length requirement to the word faith. That is worth sitting with for a second. Nowhere is there a minimum, a floor, a quota, a number below which the thing stops counting, and His Spirit is what makes that a comfort to you this morning instead of a technicality.

Here is the part that stings and then stops stinging. The embarrassment is not about God. You are not embarrassed in front of Him, because He watched every single one of those lines get tested and He knows exactly why the others came away. The embarrassment is about a room. A table, a group, a version of yourself from nine years ago with subheadings.

That room is not the judge, and you have been sentenced by it for long enough. His word puts one Lord over your list and one faith through it, and the same Spirit who set those words down has kept your four alive while everything around them was coming apart.