The House She Came Back To

She had made a picture of the coming back, and the picture had warmth in it, and that turned out to be the trouble.

Not warmth in a mystical sense. Actual warmth. In the picture she opened the door and the place was as she had left it, and there was that particular smell a lived-in house has, and something in her chest lifted, and she stood in the hall and knew she was home.

What happened was that she turned the key at about half past four on a January afternoon and walked into a house that had been empty for two years, and it was cold in the way that only a stone house left alone gets cold, which is a cold that has come up out of the floor and into the walls and settled there. There was damp on the north wall. There was a dead wasp on the sill and a smell of nothing at all.

She stood in the hall with her bag still on her shoulder and did not cry, and thought, with a clarity that has not left her since: this is what it is. This is the answer.

Aoibhe is thirty-six and she had been away two years, and the two years were not a holiday. She had gone off, deliberately and thoroughly, and she has no interest in dressing it up. And she came back not because anything went wrong out there but because something in her turned over one night in September and would not turn back.

So she came home. And the house was cold. And she read the cold as the verdict.

That was eleven days ago and she has not lit the fire, and she is sleeping in her coat, and she has told nobody she is back.

If you came back and found nothing waiting for you, hear this first: you walked into an empty house in January. What did you expect an empty house in January to be?

Temperature is not a verdict

This is the thing to see, and it is very simple, and it will take a while to sink in because feelings are persuasive.

A cold house is not a house that has stopped being yours. Cold is what a room does when nobody has been in it. It is a report on the recent history of the air. It is not a report on the deed, the lock, the name on the letters, or whether you are welcome.

She has confused a physical fact with a moral one, and it is the easiest confusion in the world to make at half past four in January with a bag still on your shoulder.

And it maps exactly onto what is going on in her. There is no felt sense of God in her at the moment. None. She prayed on the second night and it was like speaking in a room with the furniture gone.

That is real. It is also what two years of absence does to a felt sense, which is the same thing it does to a stone wall, and for the same reasons, and it is not the verdict.

You are standing in a cold room and not in a closed one, and it is already yours, and the temperature was only ever a report on the air. I am not talking a woman out of what she feels. It is written that His mercies are new every morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a temperature from a verdict in somebody standing in a hall in her coat.

Mercies new in the morning, whatever the night was

They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:23

And it is worth knowing what book that comes from, because it is not a cheerful book. Lamentations is a man sitting in the ruins of a city that fell, and he is not pretending, and the two verses before it say his soul has them still in remembrance and is humbled in him.

And in the middle of that, he says: this I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. And then the line about mornings.

Which means the sentence was written by somebody in exactly Aoibhe's position: standing in the cold of a consequence he could not deny, saying a true thing about God that his surroundings were not confirming.

New every morning. Not new when the room warms up. Not new when the feeling comes back. New every morning, on a schedule that belongs to God and takes no account of what the night was like.

You have mercies that are new this morning, and they are already new, and they did not consult the last two years before arriving. Scripture says they are new every morning, great is thy faithfulness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a line written in the ruins of a city into a cold hall eleven days after somebody came home.

Somebody has to light it

And now the practical thing, because there is one, and it is not a spiritual metaphor.

The house will not warm itself. Somebody has to get the kindling in and light the fire, and then the stone will take about three days to give up its cold, and there is a stage on the second evening where you will swear it is not working.

She has not lit it because she has been waiting for a sign that she is allowed to.

There is no sign coming, because no sign is needed, because the house is hers. The permission she is waiting for was settled the day the place became hers and has not been under review since.

You are permitted to light the fire, and it is already your house, and nobody is coming to check whether you have the right. It is written that great is His faithfulness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a woman off the hall floor and out to the woodshed.