Gravity
Psalm 31:9-10: “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and my body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my misery, and my bones waste away.”
Gravity does not announce itself.
It simply begins to act.
Most of the time, we live without noticing it. We get up. We move through the day. We lie down at night and assume the world will hold its shape until morning. Gravity is there, but it is familiar. It does not require attention.
Until it does.
One night the bed is warm with love; the next, the covers on one side remain untouched.
Nothing else has changed. The house is the same. The routine is the same. The night arrives on time. But the weight of the world has shifted, and the body knows it before the mind can find words.
Gravity makes itself known this way. Not through collapse, but through effort. Everything costs more. Getting up. Turning over. Breathing into the empty space beside you without reaching across it.
People tell you to be strong. They mean well. But strength has nothing to do with it. Gravity is not impressed by resolve. It pulls whether you consent or not.
This is the part of Lent that does not feel chosen. The part where practices stop feeling symbolic and start feeling necessary. The part where you are not trying to be faithful — you are simply trying to stay upright.
The psalmists knew this weight. They did not rush past it. They did not pretend it could be lifted by insight alone. They named it and stayed alive inside it.
Gravity does not ask us to understand.
It asks us to bear.
And somehow — without explanation, without relief — morning still comes. The floor still holds. Breath is still possible. Not because the weight has lessened, but because we have learned, slowly, how to live under it.
Prayer
God, hold me steady under what I cannot lift.
What Is Left
Psalm 130:5 NRSV “I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope.”
Nothing resolved overnight.
The memories had come and gone throughout the week—through song, through the body, through ordinary tasks that suddenly carried weight again. Now there was only what remained after their passing.
The house was quiet. Not dramatically so. Just the ordinary quiet of a morning beginning without urgency. Light entered the room as it always did. The day asked to be lived.
And still, something was unfinished.
Not unanswered questions. Not feelings needing interpretation. Simply the fact that what was lost was still lost, and what had been loved still mattered. Memory had done its work, and it had not delivered closure as payment.
Waiting like this is not passive. It is not optimism. It is endurance without explanation. Staying present to what remains when neither despair nor hope feels honest enough to claim.
The psalmist knows this posture. My soul waits. Not because waiting feels noble, but because there is nothing else to do that would be true. The soul stays awake without demanding relief.
Week 4 does not end with relief.
It ends with attention.
The Bed Goes Cold
Job 7:6 NRSV “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,
and come to their end without hope.”
It was discovered at night.
One evening the bed was warm with love. The familiar weight beside me. Breath in the dark. The small adjustments two bodies make without thinking.
The next night, the covers on one side remained untouched.
No memory announced itself. No image arrived. This was not recollection. It was discovery. The body noticed the cold where warmth had been and understood something before the mind formed words.
Time did not move forward the way it was supposed to. It folded. The then of yesterday pressed directly into the now of tonight. The difference was not conceptual. It was measurable—in inches, in temperature, in the reach of an arm that met nothing.
Job does not soften this kind of knowing. He does not search for meaning. He marks the speed at which life unravels and leaves the ache intact. The text does not rush to comfort him. It lets the night stand.
I lay there longer than necessary, noticing what was no longer there. The body registering absence as carefully as it had once registered presence.
Some truths are not remembered.
They are re-encountered.
Absence does not stay in the past.
It waits to be discovered again.
Prayer God, stay near when absence feels new all over again.
The Door Ajar
by David Wilkerson
For Beth — whose patience taught me that love waits longer than sorrow lasts.
The maples had gone black behind the drift
and made the clearing seem a larger thing.
I’d meant to walk the fields—a simple shift—
to test how cold a New England noon could bring.
But snow is democratic, hard and bright,
and soon forgot the path I thought I knew.
The sun was dropping low behind the white,
and every landmark vanished from the view.
I only sought the frame where my life stood,
the simple door that kept the cold outside—
a common latch of oak and humble wood,
where I had shelter left, and room to hide.
I scanned the distance for a weathered plank,
some sign a man had built and made things fast,
then saw a portal standing on the bank—
unmortared, yet determined it would last.
It asked no fence and offered no address,
and was too narrow for a barn’s high trade;
but in the heavy, deepening wilderness,
a door is proof that someone once had stayed.
I wondered if the frost had blurred my eye,
or if the wind had opened it and fled,
for here beneath the bleak, encroaching sky,
the heavy pine was slightly pushed ahead.
It was ajar—a crack of golden light—
that promised comfort warmer than the sun.
It did not hold the shadows of the night,
nor ask me what old tasks I’d left undone.
I leaned into the wind, and looked within,
and knew the truth that only time can bring:
the waiting room where journeys must begin,
and every winter proves the final spring.
And in that space where light and shadow met,
a warmth beyond the power of a stove,
there stood the face I never could forget—
the smiling peace of my departed love.
She offered nothing but a patient look,
no shout of warning, and no word of fear;
as calm as pages in a well-read book,
she only waited for my stepping near.
I knew that threshold was no cellar wall,
nor any kitchen where the kettle sings,
but where my wandering ceased, and where the tall
white silence takes the measure of our things.
I will not turn back now to track my prints
into the dark where fading hearths remain.
If I am standing here, it only hints
that soon I’ll see her face beyond the pane.
Then let the blizzard bury where I fell.
I see the welcome offered, clear and plain.
Hello, my dear. I see you waited well.
I only pray my stiffening hand finds
the wood
and pushes.
Outside the Sanctuary
On April 27, 1959, my grandmother Wilkerson died.
I traveled with my parents to a church in Snellville, Georgia. I was not admitted into the building. I remained in the car — a black Ford coupe — parked on gravel beneath open windows.
This was the second death of my childhood. My grandfather Powell had died in July of 1957. I remember more of him. He was sixty-four. She was eighty-six. I was too young to understand death’s permanence, but I felt his absence. I also felt, without language for it, the fracture between him and my mother, and her refusal of affection toward the woman who became his companion after divorce. Even as a child, I sensed something torn.
But my grandmother Wilkerson’s death was different.
It was my first existential crisis.
From the sanctuary, across the gravel parking lot and through the open windows of that black coupe, a hymn drifted toward me:
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.
In films, that hymn is often reduced to shorthand for naïveté — a prop for simplistic faith. But it was nothing of the sort to me.
I was a boy sitting outside a church, trying to locate my grandmother inside those words.
Where is she?
And by extension — where is he?
That question has never left me.
Now, more than sixty years later, I sit in church again. It is Lent. Deaths have layered themselves over time, one pressing upon another. Each carries weight.
But there is one whose weight eclipses the rest.
Beth.
Her absence is not historical. It is immediate. It still crushes me.
The boy in the black Ford coupe asked, Where is she? about his grandmother.
The man in the pew asks the same question now.
Where is she?
I weep for her.
And yet, in ways I do not fully understand, I sometimes experience her not as memory alone but as presence. Not as an “It” confined to the past, but as Thou — to borrow Buber’s language — encountered in moments that are unsummoned and enlarging.
I fear wishful thinking. There were long years — decades — of silence. I know what absence feels like. This renewed sense of nearness feels fragile.
But here is what steadies me:
When I sense her presence, I do not become smaller or more withdrawn. I become more loving.
If it were fantasy, I suspect it would narrow me. Instead, it opens me — toward patience, toward tenderness, toward others.
If love reduces the dead to memory alone, then death wins twice.
I am not ready to grant it that victory.
The boy is still listening through open windows.
And even now, I think I hear the hymn.
On a whim... 