The Landlord Who Never Chased Me

He has not sent one letter. That is what she keeps coming back to. Not a letter, not a text, not one of those emails with a reference number at the top.

Three months.

The first month was an accident of timing, the way things are. The second month was the boiler and the school and a week off with the little one. The third month was the second month catching up with the first, and now there is a figure in her head that she has stopped saying to herself in full and refers to internally as the rent thing.

He came round in June to look at the window, and he stood in her hallway with his cap in his hands and asked after her mother by name. He mended the window himself, on a Saturday, and would not take anything for the bracket. And on the way out he said, if there is ever anything, you know where I am.

She has thought about that sentence about four hundred times.

If he were the other sort of landlord she would have rung him in week one. She would have been brisk and clear and she would have set something up and she would have slept. She has dealt with worse men than that on the phone before breakfast.

But he is kind. And you cannot ring a kind man and disappoint him, so she has not rung him at all, and every week the not ringing gets heavier and the sentence she would have to say gets longer, and now she has begun to walk up the stairwell listening for his van.

You know that stairwell. Yours might be a friend who lent without asking, or a boss who covered for you, or somebody who once said if there is ever anything. The kinder they were, the harder the call, and it is not logical and it does not need to be, because shame does not run on logic.

Come and sit down. Let me get you something. And then I am going to say a hard true thing to you, and I am going to say it with my arm round you and not from across a desk.

There is no code, and there is a going first

Let me say the plain thing at the start, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to hold a woman who is three months behind with a hint of one.

There is no code. Nothing in Scripture makes the rent appear. Nothing here is a technique. And hear me on the next thing, because I have watched women be crushed by preaching on this subject: being behind is not a sin. It is not a verdict on your mothering, your working, or your walk with God. You have been carrying a household through a hard year and the arithmetic did not work, and there is no line in this article that blames you for that.

But there is one thing on the table today, and it is not the money.

Jesus is teaching about worship, of all things, and He says this.

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.Matthew 5:23-24

Look at what He interrupts. A man is at the altar. He is in the middle of the most religious act available to him, and something surfaces in his memory, and Jesus tells him to put the gift down and walk out.

And look at what He does not say. He does not say go and pay him. He does not say go and settle the account. He says be reconciled, which is a word about two people and not about a balance. The thing that has to be dealt with is the between.

Now put that in your stairwell. There is a between, and it has three months in it, and it is not going to be fixed by money you do not have. It gets dealt with by a conversation you do have.

You are not being asked for the money today, and the between was always the thing that needed a person rather than a payment. That is not a soft reading I invented for a hard morning. It is the plain sense of the written words Jesus interrupted a man at an altar to say, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that and lays it beside a woman listening for a van.

You have a God who put the going before the giving, and He has never once required a settled account before He would have you in the room. Scripture says leave there thy gift, which is God valuing a repaired between over a completed transaction, and His Spirit is the one who turns that into something a woman can do before the school run.

Now let me name the real weight, because I have sat where you are sitting.

The kindness is not what is hard. What is hard is that his kindness has made you into somebody in his eyes, and that somebody is a woman he asks after her mother by name, and the phone call turns you into a different woman, and you cannot bear to hand him the second one.

So the silence is not avoidance of him. It is protection of a picture. And here is the part that will sting for one second and then help: he is not holding that picture. He mended a window and asked after your mother because that is who he is, not because of who you are managing to be.

You are not going to lose anything real by ringing him, and the woman he was kind to is the same woman who is three months behind. Scripture says God knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust, which is not pity, it is a Father who is not surprised by any of this, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that written line and gets a phone into a hand.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because three months does not end because somebody was gentle with you over tea. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what intending never does. So speak, out loud, right here, before the phone. You have the standing to tell a shame in your own house what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by performance, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word further than a stairwell.