Moving The Furniture At Midnight

It is twenty to one in the morning and he is moving the sofa again.

Four times this month. It has been under the window, and along the long wall, and at an angle in the corner which lasted two days and which his wife did not comment on, and now it is going back under the window, which is where it was in June.

He is not restless. He sleeps fine, when he goes to bed, which is later than it used to be.

He is doing it because it moves.

That is the whole explanation and it took him until about three weeks ago to work it out, standing in the middle of the room at one in the morning with a lamp base in his hand.

His family is coming apart. Not in the way that makes a story: nobody has left, nobody has done anything unforgivable, there is no single event he could name to a priest. It is a slow thing that started somewhere around the year his mother died and has picked up speed since, and it is between people he loves, and it involves his brother and his own son and something that was said at a christening, and every time he tries to get hold of it, it slides.

He cannot get his hands on any of it. He can talk to one of them and lose the other. He can fix a Tuesday and lose a Sunday. There is nothing in the whole business that will stay where he puts it.

The sofa stays where he puts it.

He is fifty one and he is a man who fixes things and there is nothing to fix, and so at midnight he arranges a room, and the room is beautiful, and the family is still coming apart, and he knows exactly what he is doing now and does it anyway.

His wife came down last Thursday and stood in the doorway in her dressing gown and did not say anything at all, and went back up.

You know the sofa. Yours may be a garden or a shed or a set of accounts. But you know what it is to arrange the one thing that stays put while the thing that matters will not hold still, and to know it, and to keep doing it because the alternative is standing in the middle of a room with nothing in your hands.

Over the face of a thing that would not hold

Let me name the pit before we open the book, because if the verse lands on the furniture it will be useless.

The pit is not the sofa. It is that a man who has held this family together with his hands for thirty years has met something his hands do not work on, and rather than stand still in that, which feels unbearable, he has found the nearest thing that obeys him and is obeying it to death at one in the morning. And underneath that is a fear he has not said in any room: that if he stops arranging something, anything, the whole thing goes.

Here is the second sentence in the Bible.

The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2

Formless. Void. Dark. A deep with nothing in it that would stay where you put it.

That is the ground state of everything, and Scripture reports it plainly, and it is your family in the year since your mother died, and it is the inside of your chest at twenty to one.

Now look at what is over it. Not fixing. Not arranging. The word for what the Spirit is doing there is a brooding word, and Deuteronomy 32:11 uses the same picture for an eagle spreading herself over her nest and her young. A bird over a nest, over something with no shape in it and no ability to produce one.

Here I teach one thing about the Hebrew and I draw the line in the same breath, because on this ground the two never travel apart. The word for Spirit is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and in Hebrew it is a feminine word, so the verb beside it comes in a feminine form, exactly as it would beside the word for a hand or a house or a city. Grammar is not sex. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture describes Him with a father's traits and a mother's both, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly pictures and He chose it Himself. It does not make the Spirit a woman. It does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true, and the picture is what a man at midnight actually needs.

Take that in the middle of your own front room, and know it is not my comfort, it is the second sentence of the Bible. Something is brooding over this house while it is coming apart. Genesis 1:2 puts the Spirit over the deep before one thing in it held still, and it is the Holy Spirit who is over your family and over the christening and over your brother, tonight, at the hour you are reading this.

And one verse on is the answer to a man with a lamp base in his hand.

And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3

The shape came down. By a word, from above the water. The deep did not arrange itself and was never asked to, and there is no line in that chapter where the water is praised for holding still or blamed for sliding.

You are not the one who has to make this hold, and you were never left alone over it. Genesis 1:2 has the Spirit of God moving over water that nobody was rearranging, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves where a man cannot, at midnight as at any other hour.

You were never the one holding this family in shape. I am not putting down thirty years of a man who fixes things; every one of those fixes was real and people ate because of some of them. But the order came down the whole time, and the sofa was never load bearing.