The Same Thing Is Happening To Them

Sunday lunch at her sister's, and nobody in that kitchen has ever been anything but good to her. That is the part she cannot explain to anybody. Her sister saved her a chair by the window because she knows the light matters. Her brother-in-law carved and gave her the end piece because he remembers she likes the end piece. Somebody asks how the reading is going, and she says a sentence about it, one sentence, carefully sized, and her brother-in-law says, "Good for you, honestly, it suits you," and he means every word of it, and then the plates go around and the talk goes to the fence panel that came down in the wind.

Nothing bad happened. Write that down, because you will need it later. Nothing bad happened at all. They looked at her for a moment the way you look at somebody describing a country they have been to and you have not, with warm and total incomprehension, and then everybody moved on to the fence, and she helped carry the plates in and laughed at the right places and drove home in a good mood.

Then it is twenty to two in the morning and she is standing at her own kitchen counter in the dark, one hand flat on the countertop, praying about a thing she has never said out loud to another living soul. And you know this hour. You know exactly the temperature of the tile under your feet and the sound the refrigerator makes when it kicks in and the particular way the dark sits in a room where nobody else is awake.

And here is the thing that actually hurts, and it is not what people would guess. It is not that your family do not follow. They are good to you and you would not trade them. It is that somewhere along the way you quietly decided your difficulty is a one-off. Not the general kind that gets mentioned in books. Yours. The specific shape of it, the exact thing you were holding at twenty to two. You have concluded, without ever quite putting it into a sentence, that nowhere on this earth tonight is anybody doing this precise thing.

Peter did not write that other people have it harder

Let me get the hard part out first, because you have been polite about this for years and politeness is heavy.

There is a comfort people hand out that does not work, and you have had it handed to you. Somebody has it worse. Think of the ones who really suffer. It is meant kindly and it does nothing, because it does not touch the loneliness at all; it only adds a layer of guilt on top of it, and now you are carrying the original thing and a small quiet shame about carrying it.

Peter does not do that. Peter is writing to believers scattered across five provinces, people who will never lay eyes on each other, most of them the only ones on their own street, and he does not tell one group that another group has it worse. He tells them something stranger and far more useful.

Whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.1 Peter 5:9

The same. Not similar. Not comparable. The same, and he says it as a fact they are supposed to know, the way you know the sun is up somewhere.

You have relatives in this faith who are carrying the exact weight you are carrying, in this same week, in houses you will never stand in. Peter put that in a letter to five provinces of believers who could not reach one another, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written thing that far and sets it down in one kitchen.

Look at where he locates them. In the world, he says. It is a geography word. He is pointing at the map. He wants a woman in one province at her own counter in the dark to understand that at that exact hour, in a language she does not speak, under a roof she could not find on a map, somebody is standing in the same posture holding the same thing.

You are one of a household that is awake in shifts across the whole width of the world. Read 1 Peter 5:9 again and count the qualifiers in it. There are none, and the Holy Spirit is not handed out in portions either, a little here and a little there, but is one Spirit doing one work in all of them at once.

The same hour holds a thousand kitchens

Here is what your twenty to two actually is.

While you are standing on that cold tile, it is the middle of the afternoon somewhere else. It is the hour before dawn somewhere else again. The hour you think of as the emptiest hour there is is, at the same moment, a shift change, a school run, a long bus ride, a hospital corridor, a fishing boat, a woman cooking for six with the radio on. And in a great many of those rooms, right at that moment, somebody is doing what you are doing: holding something up to God with nobody in the house to hold it with them.

You have been picturing yourself as the one lit window in a dark street. You are not. You are one lit window in a street where the lights come on all night long, and the reason you cannot see the others is the curve of the earth and nothing more spiritual than that.

You have kin in this faith who did not grow up in your house, and their prayers this week are running down the same channel as yours. It says so in plain written terms and calls them brethren, and His Spirit is not running one private operation in your kitchen and a separate one in theirs.

And this is not a consolation prize handed to somebody whose family did not turn out the way she wanted. Please hear the difference. Your family are yours and they are good to you and nothing in this article is asking you to think less of them or to hope they change or to bring the subject up at the table. This is not compensation. This is a second fact that was always true alongside the first one: God gave you relatives you did not grow up with, and your house was never the whole of your household.

You are inside a family that has never met and does not scatter, and no room you sit in is the full size of it. That standing comes out of 1 Peter 5:9, and it is the Spirit and not proximity who makes it a household rather than a coincidence.