I Married Him And I Count The Hours

Steph can tell from the front door.

Not from his face and not from anything he says. From the door, from about nine feet away, lying still, in the dark, with her eyes shut.

There is a version where the key goes in on the first attempt and the door is pushed rather than shoved and it closes with one hand on it. That is the good one. There is a version where the key takes two goes and there is a small pause afterward, and that one is fifty-fifty. And then there is the one where it is loud in a particular way, and there is a sound of him being careful, which is worse than not being careful.

She has been reading that door for six years and she has never once told anybody she does it.

She is thirty-four. She has a job she likes and two children and a mother who rings her every Wednesday and does not know.

And here is what has happened to her body. She does not sleep until he is in. Not properly. She does something that looks like sleeping and is not, and by about half past two, on the nights he is late, she is fully awake and doing arithmetic about a hospital and a phone call and which of her sisters she would ring first.

She has never once said out loud what she has begun to believe, which is this:

If I ever stop listening, that is the night something happens. I do not know how, but I know it, and so I have not stopped for six years.

And here is where I stop talking about Steph, because you have your own door, and your own version of the good one and the fifty-fifty one, and you have never told a soul what your body does at half past two.

Let me say the first thing before anything else, and I want it said clearly: nothing about this is your fault, and nothing you did or failed to do brought it about, and nothing you stop doing will cause it. That belief is the first thing that has to come out of this room, because everything else you are carrying is stacked on top of it.

The watchman is not the one keeping the house

Let me put the true thing down first, because it is aimed exactly at half past two.

You are not the one keeping this house standing. Your vigilance is not a structural component, and the night does not hold together because you are awake in it, and Scripture says so in a verse written for people exactly like you: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

Except the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain that build it: except the Lord keeps the city, the watchman wakes but in vain.Psalm 127:1

Sit with that last clause, because it is unusually direct and it is about you.

The watchman wakes but in vain. Not: the watchman is lazy. Not: the watchman should try harder. The verse takes a person who is genuinely awake, doing the job, at their post, and says that the waking itself is not what is holding the city.

And it does not say the watchman should not be there. It says the keeping belongs to Somebody else, and that is a completely different sentence from stop caring.

So your love for him is not what is on trial and your listening is not what is holding him, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own reassurance, and God's Spirit is awake in that hallway on the nights you finally sleep.

The belief has to be named or it will not move

Now let me deal with the sentence you have never said out loud, because it is the actual engine and it is doing enormous damage.

If I stop listening, that is the night something happens.

Look at it in daylight. It says your attention is a mechanism. It says that a thing eleven miles away is being prevented by a woman lying still in a bed with her eyes shut.

You know that is not how anything works. You would say so instantly if a friend said it to you.

And you believe it anyway, and there is a reason you believe it, and the reason is not stupidity. It is that believing it gives you a job. Without it you are a woman who can do nothing about the thing she is most afraid of, and that is unbearable, and the human mind will take an impossible job over no job every single time.

So hear this, and it is the exact opposite of a demotion: you are not powerless. You have prayer, which reaches a man in a car park at two in the morning in a way that listening never has. You have your own steadiness, which your children live inside. You have your own body, which has to last. And you have a God who was in that hallway before you married anybody.

That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can lie down inside tonight rather than something you agree with in a doctor's waiting room.

And the practical half, plainly, because a message without it has failed you. Real help exists for you, not only for him, and none of it is small faith. There are family groups for people who love somebody using, and they are full of people who read doors, and nobody in them will be shocked by a word you say. A counselor for you is not disloyal. Your mother, who rings every Wednesday, could be told. And if he is ever in danger, if he has used more than he meant to or he is unwell, get medical help immediately, and in the United States you or he can call or text 988 at any hour. There are people awake right now.