It Started In The Worst Week

She has been at this nine years and she has never told anybody where it started.

She has a version. The version is not false, it is just placed differently. It begins about four months later, with a woman at a bus stop who was kind to her, and everybody who hears it thinks it is a lovely story, and it is.

The real one starts in March.

That week she had lost the job, and the flat was going, and she had done something on the Friday that she has never told anybody either, and by Sunday night she was on the floor of a bathroom that was not hers.

And she said something out loud. Not a prayer exactly. Four words, and the fourth one was please.

That is where it started. She knows the exact hour.

And she will not say it, because she has sat in enough rooms to know how it sounds. It sounds like a woman who had run out of options and grabbed the nearest thing. It sounds like desperation dressed up afterwards.

She has watched other people tell that kind of story and she has watched a certain look move across certain faces, a very small and very quick one, and she has decided she is not going to be looked at like that.

Nine years. Still going, still standing, still the one people call at eleven at night.

And the beginning of it is sitting in her like a thing kept in a drawer.

The bottom is the address

Let me say what the look on those faces actually is, because you have read it as judgment for nine years and I do not think that is all of it.

Some of it is judgment. I am not going to pretend that room does not exist. But a great deal of it is fright, because a person telling you about a bathroom floor is telling you how close the floor is, and most people would rather not be told.

Either way it is theirs. It is not information about your beginning.

Now hear this and take it as already settled rather than as comfort: the bottom is not the disqualification, it is the address, and that psalm says so without a single qualification attached. That is not my sympathy talking, it is what stands written in the thirty-fourth psalm, and the same Holy Spirit who was in that bathroom on the Sunday night has been with you every one of the nine years since.

Read it and notice there is no condition anywhere in it.

The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.Psalm 34:17-18

Close to the brokenhearted. Saves those who are crushed in spirit.

It does not say He is close to the ones who arrive with their reasoning in order. It does not distinguish between people who came to a conclusion and people who ran out of road.

It names a location, which is the floor, and it says who is there.

So take this now rather than after somebody validates the story: your beginning is not a lesser kind, because the written word puts Him nearest the crushed and attaches no test to it at all, and the Spirit of God is the one who was already in that room before you said the fourth word.

And the guard, because there is a false version and I will not hand it to you.

Nothing here makes the bad week holy. What happened to you in March was not sent, the thing you did on the Friday was not part of a plan, and I am not going to admire that bathroom floor. Nobody should want that week.

What is written simply refuses to grade the entrance, and the Holy Spirit was working in you at an hour when you were not in any condition to be reasoning about anything.