The Tabs I Close When Somebody Comes In

She has a browser window that lives on her phone and does not appear anywhere else.

It has eleven tabs in it. She knows the number, because she counted them one night the way you count things when you are avoiding something.

They are not shameful. That is the odd part and it is the whole reason this is worth writing about. There is nothing in there she would be embarrassed to explain to a stranger. It is a long article about manuscripts, two things by people who do not believe any of it, one thing by somebody who does, a forum thread from four years ago, and a page about a council that met in the fourth century that she has read three times.

She reads at about eleven at night, in bed, with the door shut.

And when her flatmate comes in, or her mum rings, or anybody at all so much as approaches, she closes the whole window.

She does it in about half a second and she has done it maybe two hundred times.

She has never asked herself why properly. If she did, she would probably say it is easier than the conversation, and that is true and it is not the real answer.

The real answer is that in the room she grew up in and in the room she is in now, a person who is reading these things is understood to be a person who is on the way out.

She is not on the way out. She has never once been on the way out.

She is twenty-four, and she is interested, and she has been treating interest like a secret for four years.

Searching is on the honorable side

Let me get one thing named before anything else, because it is the injury and it is invisible.

Nobody ever told you that reading about this was dangerous. There was no rule and no talk. You worked it out, the way people do, from small things: what got a laugh, who got mentioned in a certain tone, the fact that a woman who left is described as having started reading a lot of stuff.

Four years of half-second closings is a habit built entirely out of inference.

Now hear this and take it as settled rather than as encouragement: the searching is not the risky part and never was, and there is a proverb that puts it on the honorable side of the ledger in about fourteen words. That is not my kindness talking, it is what stands written in the twenty-fifth chapter of Proverbs, and the same Holy Spirit who keeps you reading at eleven at night is in that room with the door shut.

Read it. It is short and it is doing something careful.

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.Proverbs 25:2

To search out a matter is the glory of kings.

That is the sentence. Not the tolerance of kings, not the weakness of kings. Their glory, which is the same word used about God in the first half, held deliberately in parallel.

He hides. We look. And the looking is not a breach of the arrangement, it is the arrangement, and the proverb dignifies the search rather than permitting it.

So take this now rather than after you have finished reading everything: what you do at eleven at night is honorable, because the written word calls searching a matter out the glory of kings and sets it directly opposite God's own glory in concealing, and the Spirit of God is the one who put that interest in you and has not once asked you to put it down.

And the guard, because I am not going to hand you a license.

Nothing here says everything on a screen is worth your time. Some of what you will find is written by people being clever rather than truthful, and a forum thread from four years ago is not a source, and you already know which of your eleven tabs are junk.

What is written simply refuses to make the searching itself suspect, and the Holy Spirit has been with you in a room with the door shut for four years without once treating it as a room He was not invited into.