Standing Is Still Standing

The kitchen tile went cold overnight and stayed cold until about nine, which is why Junie had put slippers by the bottom stair for thirty years and why, for the last two, she had stopped bothering.

She came down at twenty to six the way she always had. Hall light off, kitchen light off, the little green digits on the cooker doing the only work in the room. She came down and she put both bare feet flat on that tile and she stood in the middle of the floor.

That was it. That was the whole of it.

For three decades that same ten minutes had been something else entirely. Junie had a voice. Everybody who ever met her knew about that voice inside a week. She had prayed in this kitchen at twenty to six with her hands up and her head back and enough volume that the man next door knocked on the wall once in 1998 and she apologized and did not really change anything. She had lifted whole rooms off the floor with it. People used to phone her when a thing was bad, not because she was wise, they had wiser friends, but because Junie would go loud on their behalf and they could hear it and it did something in them.

The voice was gone. Not her speaking voice. The other one.

She was not going to explain what happened, and nobody had earned an explanation, and it does not matter for this. Something came through her life the way weather comes through a valley, and when it had gone by there was no shout left in her anywhere. She looked for it. It was not there.

So now she came down at twenty to six and stood on the cold tile in the dark with her arms at her sides.

Ten minutes. No words. Sometimes her lips moved and nothing came up behind them. The fridge cycled on and off. Once a car went past with a bad exhaust and she heard it come all the way up the street and all the way down the other end.

At ten to she filled the kettle.

And every single morning, somewhere between the standing and the kettle, the same thought arrived and sat down: that is not praying. That is a woman standing in a kitchen. You used to do something here.

Having done all, to stand

I should tell you what I am before I say the next part, because it changes how you will hear it coming from me.

I am a shouter. Loud praise is my home country. Put me in a room and I will have it on its feet, and I am not sorry about that, and I am not softening myself into somebody gentler for the sake of a quiet article.

So hear this from a shouter. The passage about the whole armor of God does not finish on a shout.

You are not standing at the bottom of that passage. Look at where it puts standing. Ephesians 6:13 says to take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Having done all. Standing is not the scrap left over when the good stuff has run out. It is the sentence the entire armor exists to produce, and the Holy Spirit set the words down in that order on purpose.

Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.Ephesians 6:13

Now read the passage for volume. It is not there. Not one clause of it asks a person to be audible. Nearly the whole kit is defensive: something to hold, something to wear, something to put on your feet. The one thing in the list that cuts is a word, and a word does not require a raised voice to be a sword.

You have done all. I am not flattering you and I am not putting a compliment in front of you to keep you reading, because you would spot it and you would put the page down. Whatever it cost to be on that tile at twenty to six with nothing whatsoever to say is what having done all looks like from the inside, and His word calls the thing you are doing right now the very thing the armor was issued for. The same Spirit who put a sword in that list put standing at the end of it.

Now the honest part, and if I skip it none of the rest is worth anything.

I am not going to promise you that the shout comes back.

There are people who will tell you this is a season and the volume returns in the spring. I do not know that. Nobody who does not know it has any business writing it down where you might put your weight on it, because if you lean on a sentence like that and it does not hold, the fall is worse than the silence ever was. I keep a page with a line on it that never got filled in. I have gone on praying anyway. I am not going to hand you a promise I could not keep for myself.

What I have got for you is smaller than that, and it is solid, and you can put your foot on it this morning.

You are standing, and standing is not a waiting room. It is not the first rung of a ladder up to something louder, and it is not a stage you are passing through on your way back to being who you were at forty. What is written names it as the finish of the whole business, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping your feet under you every morning you were certain you were doing nothing at all.

This is exactly where the obvious kindness is the wrong one, and I want you to see why I am withholding it. The obvious kindness is to promise you it grows back. I am not doing it, and not because I have decided it will not. It is because the worth of what you have got cannot be made to depend on something arriving later. If ten silent minutes are only valuable as a deposit on a future shout, then they are worth nothing this morning, and this morning is the only one you are actually standing in.

So take it as it is. What is left is enough. Not enough to be going on with, not enough for now, not enough considering. Enough. His word puts the word able into that sentence, that ye may be able, and being able to stand is the stated outcome and not the consolation prize, and the Holy Spirit is not marking you against a woman who used to wake the neighbors.

And do not let anybody tell you standing is passive, because they have never had to do it. Sitting down is what a body wants at twenty to six on cold tile in the dark with nothing to say. Staying upright when everything in you has run out is work, and it is the only work the verse asks for.

You were never held up by your own volume, and you are not held up by it now. Psalm 37 says that though a man fall he shall not be utterly cast down, for the Lord upholds him with His hand, and the same Spirit who wrote that line is the reason your knees are locked on a cold floor at this hour.