The Boots By The Door

They are worn through in the same place on both heels and he is pulling them on again, and he has run out of speeches about any of it.

Early evening or early morning, and after enough years those stop being different in a way anybody would remark on. The back door with the mat that has never been the right size for the doorway. A coat on the hook that is really two coats, because the good one is over the working one and neither has moved in a while.

The boots go on the way boots go on when a man has done it ten thousand times: heel first, thumb inside the back, weight forward.

They are the third pair. He wore through the first two in the same place, outside edge of the heel, both of them, which a man who fitted him once said was to do with how he walks and had been true of his father.

Nine years of this.

He is not going to make a speech about it. He used to. In the second year he had things to say about perseverance that were, he would now admit, quite good, and he said them to people who were kind about it. In the fourth year he stopped. Not because he stopped believing them. Because a speech is something a man makes when he still has energy for the shape of a speech.

Now he just puts the boots on.

That is the whole thing. There is no defiance in it, no gritted teeth, nothing anybody would put in a film. A man at a back door with worn heels, going out again, on a night when nobody would blame him for not.

That is you, and your boots might be a uniform, a car key, a set of stairs, a number you dial, a door you go back through.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to keep going out and taking it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

And I am not going to rally you. Being rallied has been done to you, by people who meant it, and it produced a new kind of tiredness. I am not going to tell you it is nearly over either, because I do not know that.

Paul writes the sentence from a cell and it is not a boast

There is a line at the end of a letter from a man who has nothing left to lose and no reason to overstate anything.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.2 Timothy 4:7

Three clauses, and it is worth being exact about what they say and do not.

I have fought a good fight. Not a winning one. He does not report a result. There is no clause in that sentence about outcomes, and this is a man writing from custody at the end of a life that a great many people would have called a failure at the time.

I have finished my course. A course is a distance somebody else set. He did not choose the length and he did not choose the terrain, and finishing is not the same as arriving somewhere impressive.

I have kept the faith. Kept. Held on to. Not increased, not perfected, not made remarkable. The verb is the plainest possible one and he chose it last, in the position where a man puts the thing he most wants said.

You are doing the thing Paul put at the end of his life, and none of the three clauses is about a result. That is not a lift for a man at a back door: 2 Timothy 4:7 reports the fighting, the finishing and the keeping and never once reports an outcome, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a plain thing land on a body that has run out of speeches rather than the resolve anybody can produce with a thumb inside the back of a boot.

The speeches stopping is not the faith stopping

Here is what nine years does, and it is worth saying out loud because a man will read it wrongly about himself.

In the second year he had language for it. Energy has a way of producing language, and the language was sincere and it was also a symptom of having enough left over to talk.

In the fourth year the language went. And he has quietly filed that as decline, because everybody around him files it that way too: the ones who talk about it look like the ones who are doing it well.

But look at what actually happened between year two and year nine. The speeches stopped. The boots did not.

That is not decline. That is what a thing looks like when it stops being an idea a man is enthusiastic about and becomes something he simply does, in the dark, at a back door, without the shape of a speech.

You have kept it, and the keeping never required you to have anything to say about it. The written word puts the keeping in the plainest verb available and reports no result at all, and the Spirit of God has been the one getting a man out of a door for nine years, never the eloquence anybody had in the second year.

And nobody is asking you for one more push. The instruction attached to the whole armor is stand, four times in six verses, no fifth verb, and putting boots on at a back door is that verb with the laces done.

You are standing, and standing was always the assignment. Scripture calls a person who is still on their feet at the end of it standing, and His Spirit is what has had a man wearing through the same place on both heels for nine years.