We Are Fine, Thank You

The front room stopped being Yvonne's in the spring of 2019, and she could not tell you the exact week.

Her son Dre came back at twenty-six after the lease fell through, and that was fine, that was what a mother's house is for. Then his friend Marcus, for a couple of weeks. Then a rotation of people whose names Yvonne learned and then stopped learning. There is a television on until three in the morning. There is a sofa she has not sat on since the summer before last. There are shoes in the hall in a quantity that would be funny if it were somebody else's hall.

Yvonne is fifty-eight. She works the front desk at a dental office and she gets up at five so she can have the kitchen. She eats standing at the counter. She has slept with her bedroom door locked for four years and she has never once said out loud why.

And when somebody comes to the door, a neighbor, the church, her sister once, she opens it just wide enough and she says the three words.

"We are fine."

Sometimes with a thank you on the end. Always with a smile that is genuinely warm, because Yvonne is a warm woman, and the smile is not a performance, which is exactly the problem. She is not lying to anybody. She is saying a sentence so smooth from use that it does not even have to go through her.

Here is the day it caught. Not a fight. Not a police car. Nothing dramatic at all.

Sister Reeves from church came by with a dish because Yvonne had missed two Sundays. Yvonne opened the door the usual width and said the usual thing. And Sister Reeves, who is eighty-one and has buried two husbands and has run out of patience for the whole architecture of politeness, held out the dish and said, "Baby, I have known you thirty years and I have never once been inside that room."

And she left. She did not push. She just said it and went down the steps.

Yvonne stood in the hall holding a warm dish, and the television was going in the front room, and she thought: thirty years, and she has never been in that room.

You have three words. Maybe not those three. Something you say at the edge of your own life that is not a lie and is not the truth either, that keeps the person on the step from having to do anything, and keeps you from having to say anything.

The cry that nobody organized

Let me tell you what I am not doing tonight, so you can quit bracing.

I am not going to tell you what is happening in your house. I cannot see it and I am not going to guess. I am not going to hand you a verdict on your son, your daughter, whoever is in that room. I am not going to tell you to put anybody out and I am not going to tell you to keep them, because that is not something a page can see, and anybody who pretends otherwise is selling something.

What I am going to do is stand you in front of one verse, and I want you to see what it does not say.

Now therefore, behold, the cry of the children of Israel is come unto me: and I have also seen the oppression wherewith the Egyptians oppress them.Exodus 3:9

Now, look. Where is the meeting? Where is the moment Israel got together and decided to name it? Where is the delegation, the petition, the elders agreeing on wording?

It is not in the text. It is not in chapter two either, where it says they sighed and they groaned and their cry came up. Not one verse in the exodus records the Hebrews arriving at an accurate account of their own situation. What the text records is a sound going up and God receiving it.

You have been heard through a door you never opened, and the hearing did not wait for you to get the wording right. Exodus 3:9 has the cry arriving before anybody in Egypt has admitted a thing out loud, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that ancient arrival into a hallway where a woman is holding a warm dish.

And then the second half of the verse, which is the part that will hold you up if you let it. I have also seen. Not heard about. Seen. He is not working from their report. He has His own eyes on the room.

You were never the only source of information God had about your own house, and He has never been waiting on your statement. It is written that He saw it Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a seeing three and a half thousand years old land on a Saturday morning.

Three words that hold up a wall

Now hear me carefully here, because this is where a message like this goes wrong and starts hurting people.

Your three words are not a sin. Let me say it again, because somebody needed that sentence. Your three words are not a sin. There are a hundred good reasons a person learns to answer the door that way. Protecting somebody you love. Keeping a family's business inside a family. Knowing exactly what a certain kind of church does with information. Being tired. Being tired is enough.

I am not here to take your front-door sentence away from you and hand you a worse problem. That is not deliverance, that is just exposure with a Bible verse on it.

You are not required to say one word to any human being in order for God to be dealing with this already, and that is the whole point of the verse. Exodus 3:9 has Him seeing without a witness statement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a relief instead of a threat.

You are not being asked to trade your privacy for His attention, because He never made the one the price of the other. Exodus 3:9 has Him seeing the whole of it without a single Hebrew filing a word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that from feeling like exposure.

What the verse takes away is not your privacy. It is the loneliness underneath it. Because there is a difference between choosing not to tell people, which may well be wisdom, and believing that nobody knows, which is not true and has not been true for a single day.

Now let me say this straight out, because I would rather say it and not be needed than be quiet and be needed. If anything in that house has stopped being difficult and started being unsafe, for you or for anybody in it, that is not something to hold alone behind a locked bedroom door. Tell somebody tonight. Your sister, your pastor, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. I am not telling you a single thing about what to do with your son. I am telling you I will not leave you standing in that hall by yourself.