Nobody Has Been Out For Four Days

Somebody opened the front door again about an hour ago, looked at it, and shut it.

That is the fourth or fifth time today. Nobody is going anywhere and everybody knows nobody is going anywhere, and still the door gets opened, and somebody stands there for four seconds in the cold looking at the same thing they looked at this morning, and closes it.

You have done it yourself.

Four days now. Nobody in or out.

And you have run out of everything a house runs out of at this point. Not food, particularly. Patience. Ideas. Rooms to be in. There are five of you and this house was built for a family that went out during the day.

And the days have started to go wrong in a specific way.

It is about half past two. That is when it goes. The morning has some structure in it, there is breakfast and there is a sort of plan, and by half past two the plan has run out and there are still six hours of daylight left, except there is no daylight, and somebody is annoying somebody else in a way that they would not be if they had been out.

There was a thing on Tuesday. It was nothing. It was about a chair. And it got sharper than it should have and everybody knew it was not about the chair.

So let me be plain about what this article will not do to you.

I am not going to tell you this is a gift.

Nothing here suggests you slow down and enjoy it, or that this is a chance to reconnect, or that a busy family has been handed something precious. That article exists and it was written by somebody who was not on day four with five people in a small house.

Being shut in is hard. It is hard on adults and worse on children and worst of all on whoever is holding the whole thing together, which is probably you.

And the Lord shut him in

There is a short clause at the end of a long verse in Genesis, and it is easy to read past.

And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in. (Genesis 7:16, King James Version)

And the LORD shut him in.

Noah did not shut that door. The last act before the whole thing began was done from outside, and the man inside had no hand in it.

Now here is what that clause is not, because there is an obvious wrong turn here.

It is not a statement that your weather was arranged for you. Snow falls where snow falls, and I am not going to read a storm as a message about your household, and nothing in this article turns weather into a sign.

What that clause does is separate two things we normally collapse.

Being shut in is not the same as being shut out. Everybody in that ark was inside the only safe place in the world, and the same act that closed them in was the act that kept them. The door being shut was not a judgment on the people behind it.

And then think about what actually happened in there. It was months. It was a small space with a great many living things in it and no way to leave, and there is not one word anywhere in the account about it being a lovely time for the family, and no suggestion that anybody in there was grateful for the opportunity to slow down.

Scripture just says they were in there, and it was long, and then it ended.

That is a more honest picture of your last four days than anything else you will read this week.

Being shut in is not the same as being shut out, and a closed door has never once been a verdict on the people behind it. Genesis 7:16 records the shutting and never once describes the time inside as a gift, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a house where somebody has opened the front door five times today.

Half past two is a real thing

Here is the practical half, and it is about the specific hour.

The trouble is not the confinement in general. It is the shape of the day.

Your family has a rhythm and the rhythm is built around going out. School, work, errands, the walk, the thing on Thursdays. Those events are not just activities, they are the joints of a day, and they space people out from each other at the points where spacing is needed.

Take them away and the day becomes one long undifferentiated block, and five people who love each other are in it together with nothing marking the hours.

That is why half past two goes wrong. It is not a failure of anybody's character. It is a structural gap: the morning had a natural end and nothing has begun since, and the human beings in that house are doing what humans do in an unstructured stretch with no space in it, which is scrape against each other.

And the thing about the chair on Tuesday is not evidence that your family is coming apart. It is evidence that five people had been within twenty feet of each other for seventy hours.

Now here is what I want to take off you specifically, because I think you have been carrying it since Tuesday.

You have started to feel that these days are being wasted, and that a better mother would be making something of them. That there is a version of this week, happening in somebody else's house, with baking and projects and a family that is closer at the end of it.

Nobody is having that week. What people are having is your week, and most of them are also not talking about the thing that happened on the third day.

The trouble is the shape of the day and not a fault in anybody in that house, and half past two has never once been a report on your family. The written word puts a household in a small space for months and says nothing about it being precious, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody holding a whole house together on day four.

One thing together, in the gap

So here is the assignment, and it is aimed straight at half past two.

Do one thing together in the house today that you would not normally have time for.

One. Not a program of activities and not an attempt to make this week meaningful.

And do it in the afternoon, in the gap, because that is where it is needed. Not at ten in the morning when things are fine anyway.

The thing that gets pulled out at Christmas. The photographs in the box. Teaching the youngest the card game your grandfather taught you. Making the elaborate thing that takes two hours. Going through the closet under the stairs. The jigsaw with pieces missing.

It does not have to be good. It has to be together, and it has to take up part of the afternoon.

And here is why it works, and it is not because it creates a memory.

It puts a joint back in the day. It gives half past two an event, and the event does what going out used to do: it changes the configuration of the people in that house, gives everybody something to be aimed at other than each other, and marks the afternoon off from the morning.

That is all it is doing. It is a structural repair, not a memory making exercise, and it is much easier to do when you understand it that way, because you do not have to make it special.

And if it falls apart after twenty minutes, it worked. Twenty minutes is what half past two needed.

And you do not have to be cheerful while you do it. Nobody has to enjoy this week. You are getting a household through a stretch of confinement, and one thing in the afternoon is not a celebration, it is the joint that stops the day being one long block.

You are able to put one joint back into an unstructured day, and it has never once had to be special to do the work. Genesis 7:16 shuts a whole household in without asking any of them to be glad about it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present at a table on day four in the middle of an afternoon.