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Chapter fifteen
A Season Called “Due”
I stood in the doorway and gazed intently at what I knew would become the next chapter of my life. The page had turned and I was consumed with curiosity at what the text would read. The final verdict was in on my marriage and the only thing left to do was start again.
I had moved out of Arkansas into a house Dad had bought (with me in mind) in Joplin, Missouri. He had done some remodeling before I moved in but not everything was complete. There was a closet in the living room he had left unfinished with no shelves or rack. The space was apparently useless. . .but I had an idea.
“It’s perfect,” I thought. In my mind I had visions of what that tiny space would become to me. I was going to make it the most special place in the house. . . my closet of prayer.
Night after night once I’d put my baby girl to bed I would hide away. In it I would have my Bible, a box of tissues, a small blanket and a tape player. “A Vessel of Honor for God,” had become my theme song. I knew how many times it would have to play to last an hour so I could time my closet stay. Many times I would let the song pray for me as I could only weep. My honor seemed to be my greatest loss. A divorce was all I thought it took to destroy one’s honor. Getting it back was a deed I felt I could only accomplish in that closet.
When I first went in, I could hear the muffled sound of the window unit air conditioner outside the door. Weeks passed and soon I heard the sound of the attic fan roaring through the walls. Meanwhile my alternate plan was to rise with the dawn. Believing I surely had to be moving the hand of God, I would rise and stand at my kitchen sink to watch the sun come up through the window asking the same question morning after morning, “Lord, is this my day?” Just in case He would choose to turn around the misery in my life that day, I wanted to be able to say I had seen every second of it. Thus, my routine continued.
The floor of my useless looking space soon began to hum with the sound of the furnace and I would adjust the time of my alarm with the slightly changing light of dawn. Sobbing through my nightly hour in the closet, and sunrise finding me at my kitchen window asking my question, made time moved on at a snail’s pace. Months continued to pass and I never missed a beat.
In addition to my closet time, I was fasting to the extreme. I began to notice my thought processes being affected. I then began to organize my fasting days. I was trying to be sensible about this, while at the same time wanting to see drastic changes in my life. This would surely work. . .it just had to work.
One night in the Spring, I was weeping in my closet with the music playing, when I suddenly began to listen to what I was hearing. It dawned on me that the attic fan was roaring again. I froze in mid-prayer as I sat and studied the situation in my mind. I then began to change the substance of my prayer as I spoke frankly to the Lord. “Listen God,” I began, “I’ve been hidden away in this closet for what will soon be a year, and you haven’t seemed to notice.” The seasons were changing while I smothered in a closet as they whisked by. I was spending my mornings in front of my kitchen sink peering out the window asking the same question and fasting for days at a time, all with no response. What would it take to move Him? I just didn’t know. . .
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