The Drawer She Does Not Open

It is the second Saturday in March and it has rained since before she woke up.

She is in the small bedroom at the back, the one that was going to be an office and then a sewing room and is now the room where things go. She has stripped the bed nobody sleeps in and put clean sheets on it anyway, because her sister comes in June. The rain is doing that steady middle sort of rain, no drama in it, the gutter over the window ticking away.

There is a bureau against the wall that came out of the house on Sycamore. Four drawers. Dark wood, a little bowed on the top from something somebody set down wet in about 1974.

She opens the top drawer and puts the spare pillowcases in.

She opens the second one and moves a stack of dish towels an inch to the left, for no reason.

She does not open the bottom one.

She has not opened the bottom one in nine years. She is not dramatic about it. She would say she keeps meaning to sort it out, and that is even true. But it has been nine years, and she knows three of the things in there, and she does not know what else is, and that is not an accident either. She has run a cloth across that drawer front probably three hundred times.

And once, last spring, she put her hand on the pull and felt her whole body say no, quite calmly, the way you would decline a second helping, and she took her hand back and went and did something else.

That is the drawer.

And there is one other thing in this house she handles exactly the same way, only it is not in the bureau. It is in her. It is a subject, and she walks around it inside her own head the way you walk around a wet floor sign, automatically, without slowing down, without ever once looking at it straight. She has been a Christian for a long time and she has brought God a great many things and she has never brought Him that. Not because she is hiding. Because she cannot get her hand to the pull.

She sits down on the edge of the made bed with the rain going and her hands in her lap.

And you have a drawer. That is why you are here and not somewhere else. Yours might be the thing that happened, or the thing you did, or the thing you want that you would rather die than say out loud, or the pattern that has not moved one inch in twenty years while everything else in you moved. It is the one you skip when you are praying honestly about everything. And this page is not going to make you open it.

Nine years is not a moral failure

The first thing I want to say about that drawer is that there is a reason it is shut, and the reason is usually mercy.

People do not build a shut drawer for fun. It gets built the way a splint gets built, around something that could not be handled at the time. A woman has a job and a body and people who need her at six in the evening, and somewhere in there a thing arrived she could not carry and function, so a part of her, quite sensibly, put it in a drawer and went and made the dinner. That is not cowardice. That is triage.

Psalm 103 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and His Spirit keeps that written line tender rather than clinical.

You were doing the best available thing at the time, and the drawer is evidence of survival rather than evidence of sin. The God in this room is not surprised by something He watched get built.

The second thing is that I am not going to hand you a key. There is no missing technique here, no piece of information that would have unstuck this if only somebody had told you sooner. If a key were the problem, twenty years of an intelligent woman looking for one would have found it.

And the third thing: nothing here is going to treat what is in that drawer as a thing with a name that has to be shouted out of you, or as an inheritance you are locked under. It is a real thing in a real person, and it gets brought to God the way anything else does.

You are not carrying a case that needs a specialist before God will take it. Hebrews 4 says we have a great high priest who is touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and the same passage says come boldly, and boldness is exactly what His Spirit supplies to a woman who cannot even get her hand to a drawer pull.

Who can know it, and who does

Now the verse this whole shelf sits on, and I want to read it slowly, because half of it gets quoted and the good half gets left out.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.Jeremiah 17:9-10

People stop at the question mark. Who can know it. And they take that home and use it on themselves as though the verse were a diagnosis with no doctor attached.

But the question is not rhetorical. It gets answered in the very next breath, and the answer is not you. I the LORD search the heart. The searching is His job. It has always been His job. You were never issued the equipment for it, which is precisely why every attempt you have made to go through that drawer alone at two in the morning has left you sitting on the floor with the contents around you and nothing sorted.

You have a Searcher, and He does not need the drawer opened from your side to see what is in it. Jeremiah 17 puts the searching in the Lord's own mouth, and the searching belongs to His Spirit, who knows the deep things of God and the things of a person, so the darkness in that bureau is not dark to Him and never has been.

And here is the part that undoes people, in the good way. He has already searched it. Whatever is in there, He has already seen it, at the time, in the year it went in, and He did not leave. The looking happened long ago. The kindness is what is still here.

You are known all the way down and you are not being tolerated. Psalm 139 says He searched and He knew, and then it says His thoughts toward us are precious and cannot be numbered, and it is the same Spirit who makes those two facts sit in one chest without canceling each other out.

He does not need you to open it in front of anybody

Let me be very clear, because this is where people get hurt in church basements.

Nobody on this page is going to require you to disclose anything to anyone. Not to a group, not to a leader, not to a friend, not in a testimony. What is in that drawer is between you and God, and if it ever comes out to another human being, that is a thing you choose in a room you trust, and no obligation runs from this page to that room.

You are free to bring this to Him privately and it counts exactly the same. First John 1 says if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive, and the verse does not name an audience, and it is His Spirit who does the applying, so a sentence said out loud to God in an empty back bedroom is the whole transaction.

And now the other side of that, which I will not leave out. If what is in the drawer is doing you damage, or is landing on somebody else, then a person alongside you is God at work in this house and not a replacement for Him. A doctor, because some of what sits in a drawer turns out to be a body rather than a soul. A counselor, who has sat with this in other women and did not flinch and will not flinch at you. A pastor you trust. And if the rain in you has gone past sadness into wanting out of your own life altogether, 988 answers a call and answers a text at any hour, and a crisis line where you live answers too: reach one of them this afternoon, and have a person in this house with you tonight. There is no version of faith where you carry that alone.