The Couch in the Middle of the Afternoon

Ten past two on a Wednesday, and she lies down on the couch with her shoes still on.

There is laundry at the other end of it, half folded, the pile that fell over and got left. The blinds are down but not closed, so the light comes across the rug in bars, and there is a strip of it on the wall that moves while she watches it. Somewhere outside a truck is backing up and beeping and then stops.

She did not decide to lie down. She came in from the kitchen intending to sit for a second and the sitting turned into this, and now her arm is over her eyes and the rest of the day is still out there, unstarted.

And she braces. This is the part she knows by heart. The voice that arrives about four seconds after she stops moving, and it always says the same three things in the same order. Get up. Other people manage a Wednesday. This is exactly why nothing gets better.

She lies there waiting for it with her arm over her eyes.

It does not come.

Nothing comes. There is a truck beeping and then not beeping. There is the smell of the laundry. There is a strip of light going slowly along the wall, and there is no voice at all, and after a while she stops waiting for it and falls asleep for forty minutes with her shoes on.

When she wakes up the light has moved a foot and a half and there is a crease on her cheek from the seam of the cushion, and the first thought that arrives, before anything else, is not a scolding. It is: I am hungry.

Here is the other thing, and she has never said it to a living person. About a year ago she stopped asking God about the thing. There was no moment, no decision, nothing she could point to on a calendar. She just quietly retired the subject, the way you stop calling a number that never picks up, because asking and asking with nothing coming back hurts in a way that not asking does not. And she has carried, ever since, the flat certainty that He noticed her go quiet and closed the file, and that the going quiet is the last entry in it.

That is you, perhaps, on your own couch, in your own middle of the afternoon, braced for a voice. And there is a subject you have not brought up in a long time, and you have assumed that the not bringing it up counted against you. It did not. Let me show you where a man went to sleep in a worse state than yours and what turned up.

What did not happen on the couch

Start with the strangest part, which is the part with nothing in it.

The voice did not come. That is the news of that afternoon. Not the forty minutes of sleep and not the crease on her cheek: the absence of the thing she was braced for. She has been rehearsing that scolding so long that she supplies it herself before it arrives, and one Wednesday it simply was not there, and she almost missed it because you do not usually notice a thing by its not happening.

Now here is a man who lay down in a worse condition than a Wednesday afternoon. He has just run for a full day into the wilderness, sat down under a shrub, and asked God to take his life. He is finished. And the text does not record God arguing with him about it.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.1 Kings 19:5

Read what arrives and what does not. No lecture arrives. There is no question about why he ran, no comparison with how he handled the last mountain, no requirement that he first commit to getting back up tomorrow. What arrives is a touch, four words, and food. Twice, in the verses either side of it, because he goes back to sleep and it happens again.

You are lying on that couch in the same posture that man was lying in, and heaven sent bread to it rather than a reprimand. That is not my sentiment. It stands written in 1 Kings 19:5 and the Holy Spirit is the one who lifts it out of a wilderness three thousand years back and lays it on a couch with laundry at the other end of it.

You have been braced for a voice that is not coming from God at all. The word says an angel touched him and told him to eat, His Spirit is the one who makes that gentleness recognizable rather than suspicious, and whatever else has been talking to you at ten past two, it has not been Him.

Arise and eat

Now the subject you retired.

I want to be careful here, because this is the exact place where somebody usually says the wrong thing, and the wrong thing is: you should have kept asking. I am not going to say that. You stopped asking because it hurt, and stopping was not unbelief and it was not a failure of nerve. It was an intelligent creature protecting itself from a wound that reopened every single time. Anyone who calls that giving up has never had to do it.

And here is what I actually want to say. A subject going quiet on your side has never once closed it on His. That is not how any of this works. The going quiet is not the last entry in a file. There is no file.

That sentence, the one that says you did not have enough faith and that is why nothing came back, is not in the book and it is not true. Elijah told God to take his life and God sent him a meal. Nobody in that story failed at anything.

You are welcome to bring it up again today, with no explanation of the year, and no promise about tomorrow. It stands written that the angel said arise and eat before anything at all was asked of the man, and the Holy Spirit works in exactly that order still: fed first, questioned later or not at all.

And I am not going to ask you for a commitment either. You do not have to promise you will keep asking. You do not have to build a habit out of this or set an alarm or tell anybody. One sentence today, said out loud on a couch, with no undertaking about next week attached to it, is a whole and complete thing.

And one more thing, said in the middle rather than tucked away at the end, because I mean it. If the year has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if lying down in the afternoon has ever come with the thought that not getting up would be a relief, tell one living human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can come and sit with you tonight. A page cannot come over. A person can, and you are worth the phone call.