The Porch Light Left On

She still puts it on at dusk. It is the yellow bulb, the one that does not draw the moths so badly, and she turns it on at about the time the light goes off the ridge, the way she has since 1974.

She has finally admitted to herself what it is for. It is for a truck coming up the road. And no truck is coming up that road.

Her husband died at the end of April, out in the shed, and the doctor said it was quick and she has decided to believe him.

That first two weeks, that kitchen was never empty. Her sister came and stayed. Women from the church up at the crossroads came in shifts and brought so much food that she put a chest freezer's worth in the church's freezer because there was no room in her own. Men from three hollers over came and did every job on that place that had been waiting, and one of them fixed a gate that had been dragging since 2019 and never said a word about it.

Then it was the third week, and the fourth, and it is October now.

Nobody did anything wrong. That is the truth of it and she will not have it said otherwise. Her sister has a husband with a bad hip. The women at that church are between sixty eight and eighty one and they do not drive at night and it is nine miles of switchbacks. Her boy is in Charlotte and calls on Sundays and she can hear that he is trying.

But the road stays empty, and the light stays on, and she has begun to catch herself listening for a truck at about half past seven, and then feeling foolish about it, and then going in.

If that is a porch anybody has stood on, sit down here with me a while, because there is a psalm that says what she is afraid of, out loud, and it is not the ending of it.

The psalm says the frightening thing out loud

Here it is, and I want you to see that Scripture said it first and said it plainer than you would.

I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel.Psalm 31:12

Forgotten as a dead man out of mind. That is what a woman on a porch at half past seven is afraid to think, and the Bible put it in print and set it to music.

And notice: nobody corrects him. There is no note underneath saying he was exaggerating or ungrateful or in self-pity. It stands. And that same psalm, a few verses on, has him saying his times are in God's hand, and both halves belong to the same man on the same day.

You are not being self-pitying, and you were never wrong to say the frightening thing plainly. Psalm 31:12 is the written word saying it first and saying it flat, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept a broken vessel in the songbook so a woman on a porch would find it.

There is something else in that verse that is easy to walk past. He says like a broken vessel. A pot that is no more use to anybody. That is a fear about worth, not just about company, and it is the fear that arrives about month five, when a person starts wondering whether the reason nobody comes is that there is no reason to come.

You have not stopped being worth the drive, and you were never made worthless by a quiet road. Psalm 31:12 names that exact fear and Psalm 31:15 answers it in the same song, and the Spirit of God does not measure anybody by the traffic on their lane.

Nine miles of switchbacks

Now let me stand up for that road, because you have to live at the end of it and I will not have a case built against anybody.

Nine miles of switchbacks in the dark is not a small thing when a woman is seventy nine. It is a real obstacle and it does not become less real because somebody loves you.

And here is what happened to that road, and it is nobody's decision. In the first two weeks a death makes a road busy, because grief has a shape everybody recognizes and everybody knows what to do inside it. Casseroles. Gates. The freezer at the church. After that, nobody knows what the errand is. There is no dish to bring and no gate to fix and no ceremony to attend, and a good person with no errand simply does not come, because coming with nothing feels to most people like intruding.

Nobody up there decided anything at all. They ran out of errands, and an errand was the only ticket any of them thought they had.

Keep every one of them. Keep the man who fixed the gate. And do not let October turn into a ledger against people whose knees have gone.

Right now, as you read this, you are kept company by one who never needed an errand, and you were never left to a road. Psalm 31:12 is the written word taking the empty part seriously, and His Spirit has been on that porch at half past seven every evening since April.

The light is not foolishness

Here is the part about the bulb, and I want you to hear it from somebody who has left a light on for people who were not coming.

Turning on that light is not confusion. She is not expecting a truck. If she were expecting a truck she would not feel foolish, she would feel disappointed, and those are different feelings.

What the light is, is fifty years of a marriage keeping its own hours. Fifty years of coming home in the dark and seeing a yellow bulb from the second switchback. That is what that light means and the meaning does not stop existing because the truck does.

Scripture is not embarrassed by this kind of thing. Israel was told to keep a lamp burning in the tabernacle continually, and the point of it was not illumination. There were stones piled in a riverbed so children would ask what they were for. An entire festival calendar exists because God knows perfectly well that human beings keep the shape of things.

So leave it on. And when the evening comes that you forget, and one will, do not read anything into that either.

You are keeping something honest with that bulb, and you were never foolish for listening at half past seven. The written word is full of lamps kept burning on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is at work over a porch light as much as over anything in a church nine miles down.