I Keep His Door Shut

The door is shut before nine every morning and nobody in the house has mentioned it.

Including you. Especially you, because you have never once decided to shut it. It is not a policy. There was no evening where you sat down and concluded that the door should be closed.

It is that you go past it on the way to the bathroom, and the room is there, and the bed is there, and the light comes in the way it always did, and it takes about a second and a half, and then your hand is on the handle and the door is shut and you are carrying on down the landing.

By the time you notice, it is already done.

And the peculiar thing is that this is not grief exactly. You are not standing there weeping. It is more like flinching. The room is a bright, tidy, perfectly nice room, and something in you cannot take it at nine in the morning with a whole day to get through.

So you shut it. Every day. For seven weeks.

And here is what has begun to worry you, which is the reason for this: you wanted this. You worked for this. You spent four years wanting exactly what is happening right now, and you cannot walk past a bedroom.

Lent to the Lord

There is a woman at the start of First Samuel who does something almost nobody talks about honestly.

Therefore also I have lent him to the LORD; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the LORD. And he worshipped the LORD there. (1 Samuel 1:28, King James Version)

Hannah wanted a child more than anything in the world. She prayed for one until a priest thought she was drunk. She got him, and she kept him for a few years, and then she took him to Shiloh and left him there.

And the verse that records it uses the word lent.

That is a very particular word. Not given away. Not surrendered. Lent, which is the word you use for something that stays yours in some real sense while being entirely in somebody else's keeping.

You have lent somebody rather than lost them, and handing a child into the next part of their life has never once been the same as giving them up. First Samuel 1:28 chooses the word lent and repeats it in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one on a landing at nine in the morning with a woman whose hand is on a door handle.

Now the part nobody preaches.

That chapter does not tell us what Hannah's house was like afterward. It does not describe the room he had slept in, or what she did on the first morning she walked past it, or whether she made his bed for a week out of habit.

But she made him a little coat every year and carried it up to him, which is a detail nobody includes unless something was going on in that woman all year.

You are doing something with your hands that a mother in Scripture also did, and a small repeated act has never once been a sign that somebody has not accepted anything. The Spirit of God is the one who understands what a woman is doing when she keeps her hands busy about a child who is elsewhere, and the written word records the coat without explaining it.

What the flinch actually is

Now let me name what happens in that second and a half, because I think it has been diagnosed wrongly.

It gets called grief that has not been dealt with. It is not. It is a mismatch, and it is physical.

For nineteen years, that door being open meant one of about four things: he is in there, he is out, he is coming back later, the room needs sorting out. Every one of those was live. The open door was a piece of information about your day.

Now the open door means nothing about your day at all, and your body has not been told. So it looks in, reaches for the meaning it has always got from that doorway, finds nothing there, and produces a small blank drop. And a small blank drop at nine in the morning is unpleasant, so the hand closes the door.

You are living with a body that is still checking a doorway for news, and nineteen years of a habit have never once been undone by seven weeks of a different house. First Samuel 1:28 has a woman handing over a child and going on making him a coat every year, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is patient with a body that is slower than a decision.

You are managing a body that has not caught up rather than a heart that is refusing to, and a hand closing a door has never once been evidence about what a person has accepted. First Samuel 1:28 calls it lending rather than losing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman in the second and a half before her hand moves.

And here is why leaving it shut forever is not the answer, and I want to be careful in how I say it, because I am not about to hand you a rule.

A shut door stops the drop. It also, quietly, makes the room into a thing that has to be avoided. And a room that has to be avoided gets bigger in a house over time, until eventually there is a whole floor with a topic on it, and everybody in the house is stepping around a doorway that nobody has ever discussed.

A closed door is not a verdict on how a mother is coping.

You are able to keep a door open without being able to explain why it is hard, and needing a reason for a feeling has never once been a condition of dealing with it. The Spirit of God is the one who works with a person where they actually are on a Tuesday morning, and 1 Samuel 1:28 records what Hannah did rather than what she felt about it.

Open it for one day, and say so

So here is the thing, and I have made it deliberately small and deliberately loud.

Leave the door open for one whole day this week. And tell one person in the house that the door is staying open today.

Both halves matter and the second half is the one that does the work.

The open door on its own is an experiment you can quietly abandon at eleven o'clock. The sentence to another person turns it into a thing that exists outside your own head, which means at eleven o'clock, when your hand goes for the handle, there is a second voice in the room and it is not yours.

You are able to make a private thing into a shared one with one sentence, and a difficulty spoken out loud in a house has never once made anybody a burden in it. It is written in First Samuel 1:28 that Hannah said out loud what she had done, in public, in front of a priest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a kitchen when a woman says she is trying something.

And say it plainly. Not as a confession and not as a joke.

I keep shutting his door. I am going to leave it open today.

That is all. The other person will probably say something entirely unremarkable, like all right, or good, or do you want a cup of tea. That is fine. The purpose is not their response. The purpose is that it has been said in a room where somebody else could hear it.

You are saying a small true thing out loud, and an unremarkable reply has never once meant that saying it did nothing. Scripture puts Hannah's account of her own action into direct speech rather than into narration, and the same Spirit who kept her words in the book is in the sentence you are about to say at your own sink.