The Second Thing Broke First

The first one was the water heater and that was three weeks ago, and there is a man coming about it on the eleventh.

The second one was the washer, on Friday, in the middle of a load, with everything still in it.

You stood in front of it for a while. You did the thing where you turn it off and turn it back on, because everybody does that, and then you opened the door and took the wet things out into a basket, and then you stood there some more.

And your husband came in and said something about it and you did not answer him, and he thought you were angry with him, and you were not.

You were counting.

Because at some point in the last three weeks a question got into you and it has not left, and the question is: what is next.

Not what needs fixing. What is next. The house has become a list of things that have not gone wrong yet, and you have started moving through it differently, opening cupboards carefully, listening to the furnace, noticing the small crack in the tile by the back door that has probably been there for fifteen years.

You have stopped living in the house and started waiting in it.

Two is two

Let me say the plainest possible thing, and then let me show you what your mind did with it.

Two things broke. A water heater and a washer, in one month, in a house that had four owners before you and appliances that came with it.

That is two things.

What arrived in you on Friday afternoon was not two things. It was a sequence, with a direction, and a third item already implied in it.

And that is the move I want to name, because it happens fast and it never announces itself. A mind takes two data points and draws a line through them and extends the line, and the line is not information. It is a shape the mind made.

You have two events and not a trajectory, and two appliances failing in a month has never once been a line pointing at something. It is written in Isaiah 43 that when thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in a laundry room on a Friday afternoon.

And here is the cost of the line, which is much higher than the cost of the washer.

The washer is a repair. It has a size, somebody deals with it, and in six months it is a thing that happened. The line has no size at all. It contains every future item, priced at the worst, arriving at the worst possible moment, and it is running continuously in the background of your week.

You have been paying for an imaginary third thing every day since Friday, and no item that has not happened has ever once needed to be carried in advance. Isaiah 43 speaks of passing through and of coming out the other side, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps the waters as something you go through rather than something you live in.

When thou passest through

Here is the passage, and I want you to notice the grammar of the whole thing.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. (Isaiah 43:2, King James Version)

Passest through. Walkest through.

Both of those are motion words. The waters are a place a person is going across, not a place a person has moved into. The whole sentence assumes that there is an other side and that the reader is on the way to it.

That is not a small thing when you have started to live as though the trouble were now the address.

You are passing through something rather than living in it, and three weeks of repairs has never once been a change of residence. The written word says passest through and walkest through and assumes a far bank, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the motion into the sentence.

And notice what it does not promise. It does not say there will be no water. It does not say the fire will not be lit. It says the water will not overflow and the fire will not kindle on you, which is a promise about what the trouble is permitted to do rather than a promise that the trouble will not come.

That is an honest verse and I want to hand it to you honestly. A third thing may well break. This site is not going to tell you otherwise.

What the verse says is that the water does not close over your head, and that you are not alone in it, and neither of those is the same as a guarantee that the washer was the last item.

You are held in the middle of it rather than kept out of it, and God has never once promised anybody a house where nothing goes wrong. Isaiah 43 promises company and limits rather than an absence of water, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with you in the middle rather than at the far end.