The Hallway at Two in the Morning

Chantelle has a full glass of water on her nightstand every night and it is not because she gets thirsty.

It is so that she does not have to cross the hallway.

The hallway is nine feet of ordinary carpet between her bedroom and the bathroom in a two-bedroom house she has lived in for six years and loves. In the daytime it is nothing. It is where the laundry basket lives.

At two in the morning it is not nothing, and it has not been nothing since a night in the spring.

I am not going to describe that night. I want to be plain about why before we go on. I was not there. Nobody who writes on the internet was there. And the most reliable way for somebody in your position to be harmed is a stranger deciding at a distance, with great confidence, what was in the room.

So: something happened in the spring, and since then Chantelle crosses that hallway at night at a walk that is not quite a walk, and she has stopped drinking anything after nine, and there is a full glass on the nightstand.

She is forty-one. She is an operations analyst. She would tell you, unprompted, that she is a rational person.

Here is the week it caught.

Her sister's kids stayed for three nights and Chantelle realized, making up the beds, that she had put them in the room at the end because that meant somebody would be on the other side of the hallway.

She stood there with a fitted sheet in her hands and heard the reasoning out loud in her own head.

And then, on the last night, her niece, who is nine, got up and Chantelle heard her cross the hall without a second thought, going and coming, and lay in her own bed and thought about that for a long time.

You know this. There is a part of your own house you have started to organize around, and you have never called it that, and the arrangements have grown quietly and you would struggle to explain a single one of them out loud.

Every knee, and no exceptions

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

I am not going to tell you what happened in your house. 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 to walk the rooms with, a thing to do at the threshold, or any procedure at all. There is a great deal of that available and I am not adding to it.

And I am not going to leave you more afraid than you felt when this page opened. If you finish it with a heightened sense of what might be in a hallway, I have failed at the only thing this article is for.

What I am going to do is settle who has authority over nine feet of carpet.

Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth.Philippians 2:9-10

Now, notice how Paul writes that. Three categories, listed in one breath, with no detail attached to any of them. Heaven, earth, under the earth. He does not describe a single item in any category. He does not tell the Philippians how to deal with any of them. He names the categories in order to say one thing about all of them at once: every knee.

You are standing in a house where every knee already bows at one name, and no room in it is outside that sentence. Philippians 2:10 covers all three categories in a single clause, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into nine feet of carpet at two in the morning.

And notice the tense of the whole passage. God hath highly exalted Him. The name has been given. This is not a battle in progress that a person has to help with. It is an accomplished exaltation being reported.

You have not been assigned a fight, and Philippians 2 is a report about a finished exaltation rather than a call to arms. It is written that God has highly exalted Him and given Him the name above every name, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a finished thing something a person can stand on rather than something to be achieved.

You are not the one holding the line

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

The arrangements are not a spiritual failure. The glass of water is not fear winning. The niece in the end bedroom is not a lack of faith. I want to say that in whole sentences, because you have been quietly grading yourself on all three.

You are not being measured by how your body behaves at two in the morning, 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.

And here is what has actually been happening, and it is the thing to put down.

Somewhere in the spring, without deciding to, you took a job. The job is watching the hallway. Nobody gave it to you and nobody can take it off you except the person whose job it actually is, and the whole of Philippians 2 is a report that the post is already filled.

You have been standing a watch that was never yours, in a house with a Lord in it, and the standing is what is costing you the sleep.

You have never been the one holding the line in that house, and the name above every name was given before the spring. Philippians 2:9 puts the giving in the past tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a filled post an actual relief rather than a comforting thought.

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, well understood and treatable, and months of broken sleep is a medical matter in its own right. Tell a doctor plainly this week. That is not instead of God and it is not a smaller answer. And if the nights have gone somewhere darker than frightened, tell somebody tonight: your sister, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is me refusing to leave you standing at that doorway on your own.