My wife Sarah was sleeping in the back room or maybe she was just pretending to sleep because looking at the ceiling is easier than looking at a husband who cannot stop the bleeding. We had fought earlier standing in the narrow hallway between the bathroom and the laundry hamper and we used sharp words that leave marks you cannot see but you can certainly feel when the weather changes. I told her to trust me and she told me she was tired of trusting a map that led us off a cliff. Now sitting alone with the red ink I realized she was right. I had made an idol out of my own competence. I believed that if I worked hard enough and prayed loud enough and served on enough committees that the hedge of protection would keep the wolves at bay. But the wolves were here and they were chewing on the electric bill. I looked at my hands which were rough from years of biovocational work fixing HVAC units to supplement the ministry stipend and I wondered if they were empty. It is a terrifying thing to realize that your theology does not pay the mortgage. I thought about the wedding at Cana and how the wine ran out. The text never really dwells on the social humiliation of the host but I felt it there in the dim light of the kitchen. Running out is a sin in our culture. It means you failed. It means you did not plan. I felt the burn of that failure in my chest like heartburn. I wanted a miracle that looked like a check in the mail or a phone call from a rich donor but the room remained silent and the only sound was the wind rattling the loose pane in the window frame. I was Peter sinking in the waves but there was no hand reaching out to grab me yet. Just the cold water and the knowledge that I could not swim this far out.
Then the hallway floorboard creaked. It was the one that always announced a visitor. Sarah walked into the kitchen wrapped in her old blue robe that has seen us through three babies and two recessions. She did not turn on the overhead light because that would have been too bright for the shame we were both carrying. She walked over to the table and I braced myself for another lecture or another question about how we would fix this. But she did not speak. She pulled out the chair where my shame had been sitting and she sat down next to me. The smell of her lavender lotion cut through the stale coffee and the anxiety. She reached out and placed her hand on top of my hand which was clenched into a fist on top of the final notice. She did not move the bill. She just covered my hand with hers. The warmth of her skin was sudden and shocking in the cold room. The air in the kitchen shifted. It was not a sudden wind or a tongue of fire. It was just the heavy silence of panic being replaced by the steady gravity of presence. We sat there for twenty minutes without saying a word while the refrigerator hummed and the wind blew. The miracle was not that the money appeared. The miracle was that the isolation broke. I remembered the verse about where two or three are gathered and I realized it does not always mean a prayer meeting. sometimes it means a husband and wife staring down a wolf together. The peace that passes understanding settled over the table like a heavy quilt. We were still broke and we were still in trouble but the fear had lost its teeth. We were in the furnace but there was a fourth man in the fire and He looked a lot like the love that sat beside me holding my hand. We would face the morning when it came but for now we had the manna of simply being together in the dark.
