Her Cans in the Door of the Fridge

There are four of them and they live in the middle rack of the door, which is where the milk also lives, and the milk is at the front and the cans are behind it, and Simone reaches into that door about nine times a day.

Nadine is a good housemate. They have shared this flat for two years and there has never been a cross word about the washing up or the heating or anybody's boyfriend. Nadine has two or three on a Friday and that is the whole of it, and she has never in two years drunk anything in front of Simone without first saying, is this all right, and meaning it.

Simone always says yes, and she means it too, and she is not going to be a woman who makes a person feel like a criminal in her own kitchen.

So the cans are in the door.

It is not the wanting. Simone is fourteen months in and she has been through a great deal worse than a fridge. It is that a fridge door is not a thing you approach with any ceremony. You open it because you want milk, or you want the butter, or you have not eaten and you are looking for a reason to. Nine times a day, without warning, without preparing, at whatever emotional temperature you happen to be at.

Nine small unscheduled meetings a day, in her own home.

You know that shelf. It might be a fridge door, a cupboard, a bag left in a hall. There is nothing wrong with anybody. It is that your ordinary movements around your own home keep running into the same thing, and you never get to choose when.

You are promised a place rather than a feeling, and you were never handed peace on condition that a house was arranged for you. Isaiah says my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places, and all three of those are locations; the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real description of a shared flat with a small kitchen.

A peaceable habitation

Let me name it accurately, because the size of it is what makes it hard to talk about.

This is small. It is a fridge door. If you tried to explain it to somebody they would offer you a solution in four seconds and be slightly puzzled that you had not thought of it. And that is exactly why it wears: the problem is small enough that raising it would look enormous, so it stays unraised, and it happens nine times a day.

And I am not going to tell you to ask Nadine to move them. She is a decent person and she would move them today and feel terrible, and whether you want to hand her that is your call and not mine. There are households where that conversation costs nothing and households where it costs more than the fridge is worth, and only you know which one you live in.

Here is the promise, and I want you to count the words.

And my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.Isaiah 32:18

Three phrases for one promise. A peaceable habitation. Sure dwellings. Quiet resting places. Hebrew does this when a thing needs to be pressed home, and what is being pressed home here is that peace is being described as a property of a place.

Not a state of mind you are supposed to generate. Not a technique you apply when you open a door. A habitation, which is somewhere you live.

You are promised a location and you were never handed a mood to maintain, and locations do not require constant effort. That is what stands written in Isaiah 32, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that distinction land on a woman standing in a small kitchen at nine in the evening.

And look at sure dwellings. The word carries the sense of confident, trusting, without anxiety. It is not describing a fortress. It is describing the state of the people in the place: the way you are in a room where you do not have to watch anything. That is what is being promised. Not that nothing is in the room. That the person in it is not on duty.

You are promised a home where you are not on duty, and you were never told that safety means an empty room. Scripture describes the people as unanxious rather than the room as empty, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that possible in a flat you share with somebody.

And quiet resting places is the third one, and the Hebrew word behind resting places is used of a flock lying down. It is the word for the spot an animal picks to settle in for the night, having decided that this is the place. It is a chosen ordinariness. Nothing dramatic. Just the place where a creature stops being alert.

You have a place to stop being alert in, and you were never designed to be on watch inside your own home. The written word uses the picture of a flock lying down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a woman somewhere to stop scanning.

And the plain thing, said as it is said in every article here. Fourteen months and nine small meetings a day and never mentioning it to anybody is a lot of unmentioned. Tell somebody outside the flat: a friend, a counselor, the room where people say true things out loud. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and it costs Nadine nothing.