I Have Started Avoiding The Stairs

There is a basket at the bottom of your stairs and it has been there since February.

That is where things go now. Things that need to go up. And they go up when there is a proper reason to be going up, which is once or twice a day rather than the eleven times it used to be.

You have not thought about this as a decision. It is efficient. Everybody has a basket.

But last month you found yourself deciding not to go and get a cardigan, and you sat there slightly cold for an hour rather than go up, and you noticed yourself doing it and something in your chest went tight.

Because it is not the basket. There are four other things.

Your reading glasses live downstairs now. The charger lives downstairs. You changed which bathroom you use in the evening. And when your daughter comes with the little one you stay down while everybody else goes up to see the new room, and you have a perfectly good reason ready every single time.

Nobody has noticed. There is nothing to notice. Each one on its own is sensible.

And you have been carrying a quiet, private, unspoken piece of knowledge for about a year, which is that you are afraid of your own stairs, and that you have been reorganizing a whole house around not saying so.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved

There is a psalm about being kept, and the specific promise in it is about feet, which is not an accident.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. (Psalm 121:3, King James Version)

He will not let your foot be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber.

That psalm is a road song. It was sung by people walking, going up, and the going up is the whole setting of it: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.

You have a psalm here that belongs to people who were climbing something, and Psalm 121:3 has never once been written for people who had decided to stay at the bottom. The verse is about a foot on a slope, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person who is going up rather than one who is being carried.

You are able to notice how specific it is. Not your soul. Not your peace. Your foot. The psalm goes straight to the part of the body that would actually be at risk on the climb it is describing.

And then it says the keeper does not sleep. Twice, in three verses, in slightly different words, as though the writer knew it would take saying more than once.

I want to be careful here and say plainly what this verse is not. It is not a guarantee that nobody ever falls. Believers fall down stairs, and a promise read that way breaks the first time anybody's mother has an accident, and I am not going to hand you a promise that breaks.

You are being kept by somebody who does not sleep, and Psalm 121:3 has never once made that dependent on the ground being level. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person on a slope, and the psalm was written for a road that went up rather than for a house with everything on one floor.

What it does say is that the going up is not being done alone, and that the one keeping you is awake, and that this is a psalm for people in motion.

Naming it is not surrender

Here is the thing that has kept you silent for a year, so let me deal with it directly.

You have not said this out loud because saying it makes it real, and because you believe that the moment you name it, it becomes a fact about you.

You are able to name a thing without handing it any authority, and saying it out loud has never once been the same as agreeing to it. It is written that he that keepeth thee will not slumber, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a woman admitting something she has been arranging her house around.

The opposite is true and everybody who has done this knows it. An unnamed avoidance grows, because it works in the dark. It adds a room a month. It started with a basket and now it has your glasses, your charger, a bathroom and your granddaughter's new bedroom.

Twelve months from now, unnamed, it will have the top floor of your house and your daughter's front steps and the church hall with the six steps at the side entrance.

Named, it stops growing, because it now has to argue with you every time it wants a new territory.

You have been managing this alone for a year, and none of that has never once needed to be a solitary piece of work. The Spirit of God is the one who does not slumber over a person, and Psalm 121:3 puts a keeper beside the foot rather than an instruction inside the person.

So the naming is the first half of the assignment, and the naming is to one person, out loud, this week. Not a conversation about it. One sentence. I have been avoiding the stairs.

Up your own stairs, once, with somebody talking

And here is the second half, which is deliberately tiny.

Go up your own stairs once today on purpose, slowly, with somebody at the bottom talking to you.

You are able to go up a staircase you have gone up ten thousand times, and doing it deliberately has never once been the same as doing it fearfully. It is written that He will not suffer thy foot to be moved, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman on the fourth stair with a hand on the rail.

Not to fetch anything. That is the point. If you go up to get something, the stairs are a cost you paid for an errand, and the errand is what your mind will record.

Go up because you decided to. Come down again. That is the whole of it.

And the somebody at the bottom is the important part, and it is why this belongs on this site at all. Ask whoever is in the house to stand there and talk to you about anything while the two of you do it together.

Not to catch you. Not to hover. To talk, so that you are having a conversation on a staircase rather than performing a test on one.

You have a household that would rather stand at the bottom of your stairs than find out about this in a year, and asking them has never once made you a burden to anybody. Psalm 121:3 has a keeper who does not slumber, and the Spirit of God is the one who puts people at the bottom of staircases at the right moment.

Once today. Once tomorrow. Do not count beyond that.