I Sat Down On The Kitchen Floor

You did not decide to.

That is the first thing to say, because the way it has been filed since is as though it were a decision, and it was not a decision. Your knees went and the floor was there and that was the whole of the mechanism.

And then you were sitting on the kitchen floor with your back against the cupboard, looking at a machine, and about twenty minutes went by.

Nobody came in. Nothing dramatic happened. You did not sob, particularly. You sat on a floor in a house you keep, beside a thing that had stopped, and for twenty minutes you did not get up.

And ever since, the thing being carried is not the machine at all.

It is the twenty minutes.

Because the twenty minutes have been filed under a heading, and the heading is something like: this is not a normal reaction to a washing machine. And under that heading sits a quiet conclusion about how well you are actually doing, and that conclusion has been gathering weight for days.

You are a woman who sat down for twenty minutes and not a woman who fell apart, and a floor beside a broken machine has never once been a place you were not allowed to sit.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle

There is a verse in the psalms so specific about grief that it is almost strange, and the strangeness is the mercy in it.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Put my tears into your bottle. Collected. Kept. Not measured against the size of the trouble that produced them, not assessed for proportion, not returned as excessive. Collected and kept.

You are being collected rather than assessed, and tears in a kitchen have never once been weighed against the thing that caused them before God decided whether to keep them. Psalm 56:8 says put them in thy bottle without one word about what they were for, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman sitting on a floor with her back against a cupboard.

And then the second half, which is the one that answers the heading you filed it under.

Are they not in thy book. Written down. Recorded. Entered in an account that somebody keeps.

That is not the language anybody uses about an overreaction. Nobody writes down an overreaction. The whole shape of that verse treats what came out of a person as something worth the keeping of a record.

You are recorded and not embarrassed over, and twenty minutes on a floor has never once been the kind of thing God wrote down in order to hold against somebody. The written word puts the tears in a bottle and the record in a book, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps both without commenting on the proportion.

And thou tellest my wanderings, which comes first in the verse and is easy to read past.

Tellest is counts. He counts the going back and forth. Every trip across a kitchen, every getting up in the night, every pacing of a hallway in a hard month. The wandering itself is counted, before anything is said about the crying.

You have been counted on every trip across this kitchen, and a woman going back and forth through a hard stretch has never once been doing it unobserved. Psalm 56:8 counts the wanderings before it mentions the tears, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present for the going back and forth as much as for the sitting down.

Twenty minutes is not a symptom

Something practical, and it is about the arithmetic that has been quietly running.

The arithmetic goes: a washing machine is a small thing, and twenty minutes on a floor is a large response, and therefore something must be wrong with the person having the response.

That arithmetic looks sound and it is not, and here is where it fails.

The machine is not what the twenty minutes were about. It was the last item on a much longer list, and the response was to the list, and the list is not small. It is only the final item that is small, and the mind files the response next to the last thing rather than next to the whole.

You were responding to a great deal more than an appliance, and a reaction that seems too large for its cause has never once been a reaction to only that cause. The written word counts the wanderings, which is the whole accumulation and not the last step of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who reads the total rather than the final item.

And there is a second thing worth having, and it is physical rather than emotional.

Sitting down on a floor is something bodies do. It is a low, contained, held position, and people who are carrying a lot find it without being taught. It is not collapse. Collapse does not have a back against a cupboard and a view of the room.

You are able to sit on a floor and get up again, and a body finding a low place to sit has never once been a body that stopped working. Psalm 56:8 records the tears rather than diagnosing them, and the Holy Spirit is the one in the room while somebody sits still for twenty minutes.

So the assignment tonight is not to stop sitting down. It is to change the heading.

Twenty minutes on the kitchen floor. That is the whole entry. Not twenty minutes on the kitchen floor, which means. The which means is the part doing the damage, and it was added afterward by somebody who was not in the room.