Room Two Twelve

Dean has driven home from three states in the last fourteen months and he has a reason for every one of them.

The reasons are good. Gas is cheaper than the room rate. He sleeps better in his own bed. He likes to be there when the kids get up. Every one of those is true, and his wife has believed all three, because they are the kind of thing a sensible man says.

The reason is room two twelve.

He was in it in June of last year, a Hampton off an interstate, on the second night of a four-day job. He woke at about a quarter past three.

I am not going to describe what happened. I want to be plain about why. I was not in that room. Nobody who writes anything on the internet was in that room. And the most reliable way for a man in Dean's position to be harmed is a stranger deciding, at a distance and with great confidence, what was in there with him.

So: he woke, and he was frightened in a way he has never been frightened, and he could not get out of the bed for a period of time he could not accurately tell you, and at about five he got up and put his clothes on and drove four hours home and told his wife the job finished early.

Since then he has not stayed anywhere overnight. Not once. Fourteen months.

He is forty-seven. He is a project manager. He has a spreadsheet for everything and he has never in his life avoided a thing.

Here is the week it caught.

The company booked a two-night thing in October, and Dean spent an hour and forty minutes working out a way to drive it, and it does not work. It is six and a half hours each way. He sat with the itinerary open in front of him and understood that he was about to invent an excuse to a man he has worked with for eleven years.

You know this. You have quietly stopped doing something, and you have a set of reasons that are all true, and every so often the world puts something in front of you that the reasons do not cover.

He was already there

Let me be exact about what I am not doing here, because this is the article where being careless would do real damage.

I am not going to tell you what happened in that room. I am not going to name anything and I am not going to describe anything. I am not going to teach you a technique, a prayer for a hotel room, a thing to do at a threshold or with a bed, or any procedure at all. There is a great deal of that available and I am not adding to it, and I would ask you to be careful of anybody who offers you a method for a night they were not present at.

And I am not going to leave you more afraid than you felt when this page opened. If you finish it warier of hotel rooms than when you started, I have failed at the one thing this article is for.

What I am going to do is read you the most extreme sentence anybody in Scripture ever wrote about location.

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.Psalm 139:8

Now, read what the man is actually doing there. He is not describing a place. He is testing a claim by pushing it as far as it will go.

He picks the highest place he can name and the lowest place he can name, and he does not describe either one, and he says the same four words about both. Thou art there.

The whole verse is a comparison test, and the striking thing is that the lowest place does not get an inch of description. He does not tell you what is in it. He does not need to, because his point is not about the contents of the place. It is about who is already in it.

You have not been anywhere God had not already reached, and the psalm proves that by naming the furthest extreme it can find and stopping there. Psalm 139:8 says thou art there about the lowest place a man could name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a room off an interstate.

And notice the word behold in the middle. It is the word you use when somebody has not looked yet. He is not saying you can feel it. He is pointing.

You were not alone in room two twelve, and the being-there did not depend on anybody in the room noticing it. It is written that even in the lowest place, behold, He is there, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a presence real independently of whether it was felt.

The reasons are the problem, not the driving

Now here is the part I most want you to have, and it is not about hotels.

The driving is not a spiritual failure. Fourteen months of six-hour drives is not fear winning and it is not a lack of faith, and I want that in whole sentences because you have been quietly grading yourself on it since June.

You are not being measured by whether you can sleep in a Hampton, and no verse anywhere makes a person's nerve the test of anything. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an ordinary caution from being weighed as unbelief.

What has cost you is not the driving. It is the reasons.

Fourteen months of true statements that are not the truth, said to a wife and a colleague and a man on the other end of eleven years of working together. And the effect is that not one person on earth knows about room two twelve, and a man carrying something entirely alone is carrying more than the thing.

And the October trip is where that arrangement runs out, because there is no reason left that covers six and a half hours each way for two nights, and that is why the itinerary has been open on a screen for an hour and forty minutes.

You are permitted to say the true sentence to one person, and Scripture treats that as ordinary rather than as a collapse. Galatians 6:2 tells people to bear one another's burdens as normal practice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes another person knowing into a genuine lightening.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. A person waking suddenly, frightened, unable to move or speak, is describing something with ordinary medical explanations that are common and well understood and treatable. Say it plainly to a doctor this month. That is not instead of God and it is not a smaller answer. And if the fourteen months have taken you somewhere darker than avoidant, tell somebody this week: your wife, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is me refusing to leave you sitting in front of that itinerary on your own.