Thirty Years of a Quiet House

They have had the same two chairs in the front room since 1994 and neither of them sits in the other one, and Fran could not tell you when that got decided because it never did.

Thirty four years married. Two children raised and gone and doing well. A house that is paid for. A husband who has never once raised his hand or his voice, who has worked hard for the whole of it, who is kind to the dog and to the neighbors, and who has never, in thirty four years, told her anything.

Not one thing. Not a fear, not a hope, not what he thinks about when he is quiet, and he is quiet a great deal.

And she has never asked, because she was raised not to, and because the one time she came close, early on, something in his face closed and she never went near it again.

That is not a story anybody tells. It is not a marriage that anybody would say anything about. There is nothing to report. And she has lived in it for thirty four years and it has been like living in a house with the heating on very low: not cold, exactly. Not warm either.

She stopped drinking a year ago, at sixty three, and she has not made anything of it and neither has he.

And what has arrived, in the year since, is not anger and it is not grief. It is something plainer and harder to say. It is the discovery that for thirty four years she has not been known by the person who is in the room with her, and that there was something at about half past four every afternoon that took the edge off that, and it is not there anymore.

You know that house. It might be a marriage, a family, a job, a church. Nothing bad happened. Nobody would understand if you tried to describe it, because the whole of it is made of things that did not happen.

You are seen all the way through, and you were never in a room where nobody knew you. Hagar, alone in a desert, called Him thou God seest me, and she is the only person in the whole of Scripture who gives God a name; the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that available to a woman standing in a kitchen at sixty three.

Thou God seest me

Let me say this plainly, the way I would say it to you at my own table, because plainness is all I have got and at our age it is all that is any use.

I am not going to tell you what is wrong with your husband. I have not met him, and a man who cannot say things has usually been made that way by somebody who could not say things to him, and none of that is mine to guess at from a page. I am not going to diagnose your marriage from three hundred miles away.

And I am not going to tell you that sorting this out is what will keep you standing, because that would put your whole life on the far side of a conversation that may never happen, and I will not do that to you at sixty three.

What I will do is take you to a woman in a desert.

And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?Genesis 16:13

Hagar is a slave. She is pregnant, she has run, she is on a road to nowhere, and she is nobody's idea of an important person in that household. And God finds her by a spring and speaks to her, and what she does next is the thing nobody notices: she gives Him a name. Nobody else in the whole of Scripture does that. Not Abraham. Not Moses. A used, overlooked, foreign woman by a spring in the desert names God, and the name she chooses is not Almighty and it is not Provider.

It is: You are the God who sees me.

You are seen by the God a woman named for exactly that, and you were never invisible in your own house. That is what stands written in Genesis 16, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that name land on a woman in a farmhouse kitchen with the sun going down.

And notice what she says after it: have I also here looked after him that seeth me? Even here. In the desert, on the road, in the middle of the part of her life that nobody was paying attention to. Not in the tents, not at the center of things, not where the important story was going on. Here.

You are attended to in the ordinary quiet part, and you were never overlooked because your life is not a story anybody tells. Scripture puts the seeing out in the desert and not at the center of the household, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific to a house where nothing happens.

And here is the piece I most want you to have. God did not fix Hagar's situation in that chapter. He sent her back, and her circumstances stayed hard for years. What He did was see her, and speak to her, and it turned out that being seen was enough to get her up off that road and walking. She did not get the ending. She got the presence, and the presence was what she named Him for.

You are given presence rather than a resolution, and you were never being fobbed off, because presence is what you have actually been short of. The written word has her naming Him for the seeing and not for the rescue, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that an honest gift rather than a substitute for one.

And now the plain thing, and I will say it as gently as I can. A marriage where nothing gets said is a heavy thing to carry alone for thirty four years, and there is no age at which it becomes too late to tell somebody. A counselor is a good thing and going to one on your own is allowed. Your doctor, a friend, the group in the church hall on a Thursday. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and it is not disloyalty to your husband to be known by somebody.