The Winter the Porch Light Came Back On

It is a bare bulb in a porcelain fixture with a pull chain, screwed into the ceiling of a porch that her father built and her husband screened in, and for two winters it was off.

Nobody decided that. That is the part she would want understood if she ever explained it to anybody, which she will not. There was no evening when she stood there and said, I am not going to turn on the porch light anymore. It simply stopped happening, the way a lot of things stopped happening, in the months after the four years.

Four years of her mother. That is how she thinks of it now, as a unit, four years, the way you would say a stretch in a job. Four years of the chair by the window and the pill organizer with the days on it and the drive to the clinic on Tuesdays and the sound at two in the morning that meant get up. Four years of learning things nobody wants to know how to do. And then it was over, and everyone said she was a saint, and there was a lunch after, and the casseroles ran out in about eleven days, and the phone got quiet the way the phone does.

And then she went dark. Not dramatic. She got up. She went to work for a while and then she did not. The mail came in on the counter in a pile and the pile got moved and never got sorted. She quit answering the door on the first knock. And somewhere in there the porch light stopped going on at dusk and the porch went from being a porch to being the dark part between the driveway and the door.

Two years. Two years of that.

This fall she started turning it on. She could not tell you which evening was the first one. It just started happening again, around the time it gets dark at five thirty, the pull chain and the click and the moths, and the boards going yellow, and the two chairs out there that nobody sits in yet.

Her daughter noticed at Thanksgiving. Said it lightly, standing in the driveway with a pie carrier. Light's on, Mama. And she said, well, and went in, and stood in the kitchen a minute with her coat still on.

Because here is the thing she cannot get settled. That is the only difference. Two years, and the only thing she can point at is a bulb. She still does not sort the mail. She still does not answer the first knock. If somebody asked her what God has been doing since the funeral, she would have exactly one item to hand them, and it is a light switch, and she is not at all sure it counts.

You have your own bulb. Two years, or five, or nine, and one small thing that is different, and you cannot decide whether to call it progress or to call it nothing and be honest. You are looking at something real and refusing to let it be real because it is not big enough to convince anybody. It is written in Isaiah 42:3 that the smoking flax He does not quench, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been keeping a wick alive in a dark house for two years without once needing you to see Him do it.

What He said about a wick with no flame on it

Here is the verse, and it is short, and every word in it is doing work.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.Isaiah 42:3

Smoking flax is a lamp wick that has gone out. That is what the phrase means. Not a small flame, not a low flame. Out. There is no light coming off it. All it is doing is smoking, which is the thing a wick does on its way to being nothing, and anybody walking past would pinch it and be done and would not think twice about it.

And God says: not that one. He does not quench it. He does not put it out and He does not throw it away and He does not replace it with a wick that is performing better.

Now notice what the verse does not say, because this is where people add things He did not promise. It does not say He fans it into a blaze by Thursday. It does not put a date on it. It does not say the reed straightens up this season. What He guarantees is that He does not break and He does not quench, and that is a statement about His character rather than a schedule for yours.

You are the one that verse was written about, and He is not going to pinch you out. That is written in Isaiah 42:3 in words about flax and a reed rather than about strong people, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been the reason there was still smoke coming off a wick in a house where nobody was sorting the mail.

Slow is not stalled, and it never was

Now the honest part, and it is not going to be sped up at the end.

I am not going to promise you it gets faster. Nobody who tells you that knows it. And I am certainly not going to hand you a way to hurry it along, because that would put the whole weight of two years onto a woman who has already carried four, and the burden here is not yours. There is nothing you failed to do. There is no lever you missed.

What I will say is that the arithmetic you are running is wrong in one specific place. You are treating what you can see as the whole of what is happening. Those are not the same quantity and they have never been the same quantity. The wick was alive the whole two years the porch was dark. The smoke was not the life. The smoke was just the part that was visible.

And restored is not replaced. Nobody is handing you back the woman you were before the four years, and I am not going to tell you that you get her. Replaced would be a swap. What is actually happening is slower and it is going on underneath, and it is the same woman being put back together, at a rate that would not show up on any chart anybody could draw.

You have a work going on in you that is not required to be visible to you in order to be real. The word says He does not quench, in Isaiah 42:3, and that is a promise about what He is doing and not about what you can detect, and it is the same Spirit who kept that wick who is doing the slow work in you that you cannot see from inside it.