Day Two Hundred

Left out of the elevator, past the double doors that are always propped, past the room with the sign about the fridge, second on the right.

She could do it with her eyes closed and has, once, as an experiment, on about day ninety, out of a boredom she was slightly ashamed of.

Two hundred days. Not consecutive; there were four she missed and she can tell you what each of them was for. Call it a hundred and ninety six.

The six things in order: coat on the hook behind the door, water jug checked and changed if it needs it, the blind adjusted, the same four questions asked in the same words because the same words get the truest answers, hands washed again, and then sit down on the chair on the left, which is the chair with the arm that does not wobble.

Then whatever the day is. Some days there is a conversation. Some days there is a nurse and a change and a thing to be managed. Some days he sleeps and she reads, and those are not bad days.

She is fifty seven and this has been her life since March of last year.

Here is the thing about the corridor, and it is the reason this article exists rather than an article about being tired. She has stopped being able to think about the future. Not in a depressed way. It has simply gone. Somewhere around day one hundred and thirty the future stopped being a thing she had, and what is left is a corridor and six things in order and whatever the day is.

And she has noticed that she does not want anybody to give the future back to her, because every version of it she can construct involves something she does not want to look at, and the corridor is, for now, more bearable than any of them.

So she does not want to be told what is coming. She wants something that is true today, in the corridor, on the way to the same door.

You will have your own corridor. The stretch you walk daily, where the future has quietly stopped being available and you are not entirely sorry.

Where the fullness actually is

There is a line at the end of a psalm that is worth reading very slowly, because the location it names is not the one people usually take from it.

You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.Psalm 16:11

Everybody hears forevermore and reads the whole verse as a description of later. And the last clause does reach forward. But look at the middle one, which is the one she needs.

In your presence there is fullness of joy. Not in your promises. Not in your outcomes. Not at the end of the corridor. The location named is a presence, and a presence is the one kind of thing that is available in a corridor at eleven in the morning on day two hundred.

So take it plainly: you are walking toward a door with the fullness already in the hallway, and that is what Psalm 16 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the last line of a psalm and lays it down past the double doors that are always propped.

And notice the word fullness, because it is a strange word to find in that position. Not a measure of joy. Not some. The whole of it, located in a presence rather than in a circumstance, which means it is not being rationed according to how the day is going and does not require the day to improve in order to be at its full size.

Which is the answer to a woman who cannot think about the future and does not want it back. She has assumed, without ever quite putting it into words, that joy is something that lives at the far end of a situation and is therefore currently unavailable to her because she cannot see a far end. The psalm puts it somewhere else entirely, and the somewhere else is portable and is already in the building.

You have been in the room where the fullness is, on all two hundred of those days, because the written word locates it in a presence rather than in an ending, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a woman on the chair with the arm that does not wobble.

And the first clause matters too, and it is the one that lets her stop trying to see ahead. You make known to me the path of life. Make known. It is His job. The psalm does not hand a person a map and ask them to plan a route; it describes somebody who is shown the path, presumably as they go. You have not been required to be able to see the future in order to be walking somewhere, and Scripture is what removes that requirement, and His Spirit is the one who makes not knowing feel like company rather than blindness.

What this article will not tell her

Now the guardrail, and this article needs it more than most.

Nobody is going to tell her what is coming. Not that he improves, not that he does not, not that there is a plan, not what the plan is. Scripture does not describe it and anybody who does is furnishing a silence with their own furniture, and she has been in that corridor for two hundred days and would know immediately.

And nobody is going to tell her what these two hundred days are producing in her. Nothing is being produced. It is not a curriculum and it is not a refining. This site will not repurpose a hospital room into a lesson with her at the middle of it.

And nobody is going to make the weariness smaller by pointing at something ahead. The tiredness is the size it is. Naming what is ahead is not a way of shrinking today.

And the two hundred days are not accruing anywhere. There is no account. The crown in this book is placed on a head by somebody else and thrown down, and nobody in that scene is being paid for a hundred and ninety six visits.

You are held by a regard that has nothing to do with how many days you have come, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You have nothing ahead to earn and nothing to be shown, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit is what keeps a corridor from becoming an installment plan.