I Did Not Choose This Fire

The bed came on a Thursday.

Gordon remembers that, because he had to take the day, and because two men in polo shirts carried it up the stairs in pieces and put it together in the back bedroom in eleven minutes, and then one of them said all right mate and they were gone, and the room was not a spare room any more.

That was eleven months ago. Nobody asked him. That is the sentence he has never said out loud, and it is not bitterness, it is just accurate. There was no meeting. There was no moment where a person with a clipboard said, Gordon, do you want this life instead of the one you had. There was a fall, and then a hospital, and then a phone call from a woman doing her job well, and then a Thursday, and then this.

He gets up at ten to six because the night is over by then whether he slept or not. He does the tablets first, in the plastic box with the days on it, and he has never once got that wrong, which he is quietly proud of. He does the curtains. He does the kettle. He talks about the weather and the football to a man who was a shift supervisor for thirty-one years and can still hum the whole of a hymn but cannot always find the word cup.

And here is the thing nobody warns you about. It is not the hard days. Gordon can do a hard day. He carried worse than this at work.

It is that there is no edge to it.

There is no Friday. There is no end of shift. There is no version of the week where he is off. The thing simply continues, and continues, and continues, and it burns off the small stuff first, the way heat does. First it took the five-a-side. Then the two hours on a Sunday. Then it took the ability to plan anything at all more than four days out, and then it took the part of him that used to want to.

He does not resent his father. Not for a second. Write that down, because people assume it and they are wrong.

He is just extremely tired, in a way that sleep does not touch, and he has begun to notice that he does not pray any more so much as he reports in.

And on the bad nights, standing at the sink at half past eleven with the water running over a plate he has already washed, one thought arrives and will not leave.

Nobody asked me whether I wanted refining, and it happened to me anyway.

You know this. Maybe your version is a diagnosis. Maybe it is a marriage that went in a direction you did not sign for. Maybe it is a body that changed the terms without consulting you, or a job that ended, or a child who is struggling and there is no shift end on that either.

You did not choose it. You did not agree to it. And there is nobody to be angry with about that, which is somehow the worst part, because anger at least has somewhere to go.

The only claim I am going to make

I want to be very careful with you now, because this is the place where people who mean well say things that do damage, and I have sat with the damage afterwards.

I am not going to tell you God sent this. I do not believe that, I will not say it, and if somebody said it to you at a church door I am sorry.

I am not going to tell you there is a lesson in it. I am not going to ask you what you think you were meant to learn. That question, asked of somebody in the middle of it, is a small cruelty dressed as depth, and you owe nobody an answer to it.

I am not going to tell you this is good. It is not good. Heat is not good. A thing that takes your Fridays and your plans and the part of you that wanted things is not a gift with difficult wrapping, and any message that makes the fire sound lovely has failed you and should be thrown away.

I have exactly one thing to say and it is not a small one.

You are not in there on your own.

There were three men in a furnace once, and they had not chosen it either. The king who put them there was watching, expecting the ordinary outcome, and he stood up out of his seat instead, because he could not make sense of what he was seeing.

Look, I see four men walking about loose in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt, and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.Daniel 3:25

Four.

Not three men and a rescue arriving later. Not three men and a door opening. Four men, in there, walking about, and the fourth one had come in.

Nobody hands that verse to you as an explanation, because it is not one. It does not say why the furnace. It does not say what the heat was for. It never once tells you that the fire was a good idea, and the king who ordered it does not come out of that chapter looking wise.

It tells you the arithmetic in the room, and the arithmetic is four.

And you are not standing in this on your own and the claim is not larger than that. That is not my consolation: the written word gives no reason for the furnace anywhere and gives the count in the middle of it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man at a sink at half past eleven.

That is the whole claim. He does not stand at the door of the thing you did not choose and call encouragement in to you over the noise. He walks in. That is His character and it is the most consistent thing about Him: at every point in the story where He could have shouted from outside, He came inside instead, into a body, into a stable, into a grave, into a back bedroom at ten to six with the tablets in the plastic box.

And you have a God who came inside rather than calling in. The word says the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, which is a whole sentence about coming in, and the Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary rather than theological in a back bedroom at ten to six.

You have been counting the people in your fire and getting the number wrong.