The Months In The Corridor

Second chair from the door on the left. He could draw it now.

Four months of that corridor, on and off, with the vending machine at one end that took his coins twice and the double doors that only opened from the other side and the particular quality of light hospitals have at four in the afternoon in November.

His family came and went. He was the one who stayed.

And somewhere in the second month, sitting in that chair with a cold coffee, he arrived at a conclusion. It did not feel dramatic. It felt like an observation about the facts. Nobody is coming. This is ours to carry and we are carrying it, and God is somewhere, and He is not in this corridor.

He has never said it in those words to his wife. But it settled in him and it never left, and the whole family has been living downstream of a sentence one man thought in a plastic chair.

If you decided something like that in a hard season, sit down at this table. Nothing about what happened to your family is going to be explained here.

Where that conclusion came from

Let us look at the conclusion itself, because it has been running the household for a long time without ever being examined.

It was reached in a corridor, on very little sleep, by a man doing the hardest thing he has ever done, and it presented itself as an observation rather than as a verdict, which is exactly why it was never questioned. Observations do not get appealed.

That is not a failure of faith. It is what exhaustion does with an absence of evidence, and every human being does the same arithmetic under that kind of load.

You were not on your own in that corridor. Nothing about those four months was God standing off, and nothing that happened there put your family outside His reach. I am not saying it to comfort you. The written word says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart (Psalm 34:18), which places His nearness exactly where a man in a plastic chair will not believe it, and the Holy Spirit holds that steady in a corridor at four in the afternoon.

Asleep in the back of the boat

Here is what steadied me on this, and it is not a reading of what your family went through.

There is a storm on a lake, and the boat is filling, and the men in it are professional fishermen who know exactly how bad it is, and they go and wake Him up.

And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish?Mark 4:38

Read what they say. Carest thou not. That is the same sentence a man reaches in a corridor, and it is in Scripture, said out loud, by people who were with Him at the time.

And the thing that verse establishes before it establishes anything else is this: He was in the boat. He was in the boat the whole time, in the storm, in the same water, going down with them if it went down. What they could not see was not His absence. It was His sleep.

You had Him in the boat, and not being able to see Him working was never the same as being alone. That is written down as the location of a Person in a storm, and the Holy Spirit is the one that makes it register in a man who drew a conclusion in a corridor.

Nothing is being added to your four months

Something has to be said very plainly here, because a section like the last one usually comes with a lesson attached.

I am not going to tell you what those months were for. Not strengthening your family, not teaching anybody anything, not something permitted in order to produce something. A man who was not in that corridor has no business assigning it a purpose.

You have one claim in this article and it is the whole of it: He was there. Nothing else is being said about your four months. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence (Psalm 139:7), asked as a question with no answer available, and the Holy Spirit is the one who was in the second chair from the door on the left.

And if those months left more behind than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.