The Garage With the Door Up

The marker squeaks on the tape and he writes the word for the third time. Kitchen. He crosses it out. Loft. He crosses that out too, and stands there with the lid open and a box of things that belong nowhere in particular, and the street going by behind him.

He has had the door up every evening for three months, since the job finished. It started as a project, the kind a man gives himself when the days have lost their edges: sort the garage, get it straight, one thing done properly. The neighbors have got used to seeing him in there. The boy from two doors down waves on his bike. A woman walking her dog says it is looking good in there, and he says thanks, and it is not looking good in there. It looks exactly as it did in the spring, only with more labels.

Because it is not the garage. He knows that, standing with the marker. It is that nothing will hold a shape. The weeks used to have a shape and the shape came from outside him, from a shift pattern and a wage and a reason to be up, and when that went the weeks went soft, and he has been trying to give them edges by hand ever since. Boxes. Lists. A plan for the week written on Sunday and dead by Tuesday. Everything in him is formless and dark and he cannot get it to hold, and he has decided, without ever deciding, that it is his job to make it.

The dog walker has gone. The light is going. He is standing in a rectangle of it, on the concrete, with a marker, and the thought that arrives is not a spiritual one. It is simply that he is very, very tired.

You know the box. Whatever your garage is, you know the thing you have labeled three times because labeling it is the only kind of order you can produce, and it is not order, and you know it is not, and you keep doing it because the alternative is to stand still in the dark with nothing holding a shape, and you do not think you are allowed to do that.

Before anything had a shape

Let me name the pit first, and it is not the garage. It is exhaustion, the specific exhaustion of a person who has concluded that if their life is going to have any order in it they will have to manufacture it themselves, by hand, one label at a time, and who is failing, and who is failing in public with the door up. That is the weight. Not the mess. The belief that the mess is yours to sort before anyone comes.

Now here is the second sentence in the Bible, and I want you to read it as slowly as you have ever read anything.

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

Formless. Dark. A deep with nothing holding a shape in it. That is the first thing Scripture ever says about a state of affairs, and it is your garage, and it is the inside of your chest at nine at night. And notice what is happening over it. Not organizing. Not sorting. Hovering. The Spirit of God is over the deep before a single thing in it has been given an edge, and the shape, when it comes, comes from above the water and not up out of it.

Here I have to teach you one thing about the Hebrew, and I am going to teach it and draw the line in the same breath, because this site does not do one without the other. The word for Spirit here is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and in Hebrew it is a feminine word, so the verb that goes with it, hovering, is in the feminine form, the way the verb for a door or a hand or a city would be. And the verb itself is a bird's verb. It is the word Deuteronomy 32:11 uses for an eagle spreading itself over its nest, over its young. So the picture Scripture chose for the Spirit over the first chaos is a bird brooding over a nest, in a grammar that happens to be feminine. Now the line, and it is not a small one: 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, and this is one of the motherly ones, chosen by Him. It does not make the Spirit a woman. It does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true: over your formless dark, before you have sorted anything, something is brooding, and it is Him.

You are being hovered over right now, in the state you are in, before a single box is right. I am not speaking my own comfort over you. It is written in the second sentence of the Bible, and the Spirit of God who brooded over that deep is the same Spirit, and there is not a different one for you.

Where the shape comes from

Read on one verse. And God said, let there be light. The order in Genesis 1 comes by a word from above the water. It does not come from the deep pulling itself together. The deep did not organize itself into land and sea and days; it was spoken into shape while it was still being brooded over. Which means the deep had one job during the whole of that, and the job was to be there.

That is your job in the garage tonight. It is the hardest work you have ever been assigned, because it is not work. It is being brooded over while formless, and not reaching for the marker.

You were not made to give your own life its edges by hand. That is not laziness being blessed; it is the created order, and it is written into how the first day went, and the Spirit who hovered then does not wait for you to make the first move. He hovers first. Then He speaks. The order comes down.

I want to be careful here about what I am not saying. I am not saying the job will come back by Friday, or that the garage will sort itself, or that God will produce a shift pattern out of the dark. I do not know what shape He will speak over your weeks, and I am not going to pretend to. What I know is the order of operations in the first chapter of the Bible, and it goes brooding, then word, then shape, and never shape first.