The Landing at Two in the Morning

Jo has been standing on that landing for about a year.

Not every night. But often enough that she knows which board creaks and how far she can push the door without it making a sound, and she can tell from the shape under the duvet whether Immy is asleep or doing the thing where she is awake and pretending.

Immy is fifteen. She has not been well since the spring before last.

There is a plan. That has to be said, because it is the part that matters practically: there is a team, and appointments that Jo has fought for and will keep fighting for, and a thing that helps a bit and a thing that did not, and none of that is what this article is about and none of it is going anywhere.

What this is about is the landing.

Because for a year Jo has stood out there in the dark, at two, at half past three, and prayed. Properly, and then desperately, and then in a kind of shorthand that would not look like praying to anybody watching.

And nothing that she can see has changed.

Some weeks are better. Some are worse. Last October was frightening and February was almost normal and then March was not. And Jo, who is not a dramatic woman and who has never once said this out loud, has arrived at a quiet conclusion about the landing.

Nobody is there.

Not God is not real. She still believes all of it. It is more specific and more painful than that: she believes He is real and she has stopped believing He is on the landing.

Her mother came to stay in the April.

And she found Jo out there at ten past two, sitting on the top step in a dressing gown with her back against the wall, and she sat down next to her, which at seventy-three takes a while.

They did not say anything for a bit.

Then her mother said, "I did this."

Jo said, "What?"

"Eleven years. With you. From when you were about fourteen. I stood outside your door and I prayed, and I never once saw it working."

Jo said, "You never told me that."

And her mother said, "No."

And then she said the thing.

"I do not know what it did, love. I never have. I am not going to sit here and tell you it worked, because I could not prove it and I would not insult you." She shifted on the step. "What I know is that I was not on my own out there. And I could not have told you how I knew, and I still cannot, and it is the only thing I have got that is worth handing you."

Read the promise as it is actually written

Isaiah has a verse that gets put on cards and mugs, and the mugs usually cut it in half.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they will not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, nor will the flame burn you.Isaiah 43:2

Look at the small word that governs the whole thing, and it is the same one every time.

Through.

Not around. Not instead of. Through the waters, through the rivers, through the fire. God does not say there will be no waters, and the promise would be worth nothing if He did, because you are already standing in them.

And look at what He does promise: I will be with you. That is the content. Company, in the water, all the way through it.

So hear this said over you, on the top step at ten past two. You are not standing on that landing alone, and the year of seeing nothing has not moved Him off it. That is written down in exactly those words, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as the one who comes alongside, which is a word about proximity rather than about outcomes.

Now let me be very careful about two things, because you have been handed a lot of careless sentences this year and I am not adding to them.

The first: nothing in this message says God did this to Immy.

Not to teach her, not to teach you, not to build anything. That sentence gets offered to parents constantly and it is not in Isaiah and it is not here, and if anybody has said it to you this year you may put it down.

The second: nothing in this message promises you an outcome.

I cannot tell you what next year looks like, and anybody who does is guessing with your daughter's life. What I can tell you is what God actually said, which is that He is in the water with the people who are in the water, and that is a real promise and it is not the one you asked for and it is the one that is true.

Now let me say something about the year itself, because you have been reading it wrong.

Nothing you can see has changed. That is exactly what your mother said about eleven years.

And she is here, seventy-three, on a stair carpet at two in the morning, next to a daughter who came through. She will not claim the praying did it. She is too honest for that and so am I.

But she can tell you what she knows, and it is the same thing this whole site is built on. God does His most decisive work in the places where nothing about Him can be seen. At a cross, in the dark, with no answer to the cry and every visible fact saying He had gone. He had not. He was doing the thing that saved the world, and there was nothing to see.

Which means your landing, where there is nothing to see, is not evidence of an empty house. That is written, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in a hallway at two in the morning whether or not a tired woman can detect Him.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote to a friend whose child was ill that he had no explanation to offer and would not manufacture one, and that all he could say for certain was that Christ is nearest where He is least visible, and that this had been true in his own house.