The Spare Bedroom

I was 19 and I no longer had a home.

My family disowned me for being a Christian. That’s the short version, and I’m going to leave it short, because if you’ve read what I’ve written about Cinderella, you already know the shape of my mother. She played that part about as fully as a real woman can. I left with very little, and I had nowhere particular to go.

Eric was the one who offered. He and his family were in Arizona, and his mother had a spare bedroom, and they took me in after I graduated from bible school. I didn’t understand then how unusual that was. A nineteen-year-old girl with a box of belongings and a mother who would not stop calling, and they opened the door without making me prove I was worth it.

Eric handled my mother. When she called, he took the phone. When she pushed, he pushed back, and he stood between us while I slowly learned what a boundary was and how you hold one. I had protection, for the first time in my life. I had one less thing on my plate. I had room to be a mess while I figured out how to be an adult, and I used every inch of it.

It never occurred to me, in all the years I slept in his mother’s spare room, that I was asking something of him. I didn’t think about the weight. I just leaned on it.

I’ve written plenty about what kind of man Eric became, and I won’t take any of it back. But there were slivers of good in him, and this was the clearest one. He carried my need for healing, and he did it without flinching. I’m sure it cost him something I never saw. He carried it anyway. And because he did, I healed from my mother. Not partially, not in the way people say they’ve “made peace” with something while it still runs their lives. I healed.

I think about that spare bedroom whenever someone else’s wounds show up in my life,

because I’m not 19 anymore. I’m in my 40’s, with a son, a career, a house to keep, and a calendar that doesn’t have much give in it. The space I could afford to need back then is not the same as the space I can afford to give now.

I’ve turned down friendships over this. I have a phrase I use for it: too many holes in the boat. Sometimes I meet someone and within a few conversations I can see the leaks, old wounds nobody’s patched, and I know that stepping aboard means spending most of my energy bailing. So I don’t step aboard. Some of those decisions were wise. I’m less sure about others.

Because I was the boat with the holes, once. And somebody let me aboard.

The paralyzed man in Mark 2 didn’t get to Jesus on his own.

Four men carried him. When they couldn’t get through the crowd, they climbed onto the roof, dug through it, and lowered his mat down into the room. And Mark adds a detail that has always struck me: “when Jesus saw their faith,” He spoke to the paralytic (Mark 2:5). The faith that got him healed was, at least in part, the faith of the people carrying him.

That’s what Eric’s family was for me. Not only Eric. A whole household. His mother gave the bedroom. Others gave time, patience, a seat at the table. I came down through the roof on a mat carried by several pairs of hands.

What I notice now is the number. Four men. Nobody carried that mat alone, and I suspect nobody could have. I wonder if part of why healing feels so heavy in my adult relationships is that we keep expecting it to be carried by one person: one friend, one spouse, one counselor-figure who’s also supposed to be your companion and your date and your accountability partner. That’s a lot of mat for one set of arms.

The other truth is that baggage never travels alone.

Proverbs puts it bluntly: “A man’s spirit will endure sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?” (18:14). I used to read that as a question about the person with the crushed spirit, how they’ll survive it. I read it differently now. Who can bear it? Who else is in the room, holding it up?

Hebrews makes the same point from another angle. “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled” (12:15). Many. An unhealed wound doesn’t stay inside the person who has it. It sends up shoots into every relationship nearby.

I don’t say that to shame anyone, including my nineteen-year-old self. I needed what I needed. But I also didn’t count what my healing cost the people holding the mat, and I think it’s fair to ask whether I’ve carried that same blindness into later relationships. Eric’s cruelty in later years was his own, and nothing about my healing excuses it. I can hold that and still admit I never once asked what it was like for him to stand between me and my mother.

So what does God expect of us, when we’re the ones carrying the wound?

I don’t think the expectation is that we arrive healed. If it were, nobody would ever be in a relationship. But Hebrews, a couple verses before that warning about bitterness, gives a charge I find practical: “Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed” (12:12-13).

The lame foot is assumed. The writer doesn’t pretend it isn’t there. What he asks is that we choose paths that let it heal instead of paths that make it worse. That’s the responsibility the wounded person carries. Not perfection. Direction. Are you walking toward healing, or are you walking in circles around the injury and asking everyone else to walk with you?

That’s the question I ended up asking on the phone.

I’ve had a series of long calls lately, and over the course of them I started to feel like I was walking a minefield. Almost anything I said touched something buried. A passing comment would turn into an hour about a wound from years ago. There was so much of the past still unaddressed that there was very little room for the present, and none, it seemed, for me.

At the time I took it personally. I decided there was simply no room for me in that life. Maybe that was part of it. But I’ve come to think the more accurate reading is that the past was clouding everything, and someone standing in that much fog can’t see who’s beside them, however much they want to.

So I asked the hard question. Are you ready to be close to another human being right now? Or do you think you are because it’s what you want?

I didn’t ask it to be cruel. I asked it because I’d watched myself want things I wasn’t ready for, more than once.

Jesus asked nearly the same thing at the pool of Bethesda. A man had been an invalid for thirty-eight years, and Jesus looked at him and asked, “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6). It sounds like an odd question to put to a man who’s been lying by a healing pool for decades. Of course he wants it. Except the man doesn’t say yes. He explains why it hasn’t happened: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool, and while I am going another steps down before me” (5:7).

That answer has stayed with me. Thirty-eight years in, the man’s first response to the offer of healing was a list of obstacles. Jesus healed him anyway. But He asked first, and I think the asking was part of the mercy. It made the man look at what he wanted.

Relationships are where we find out what’s still broken.

“Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment” (Proverbs 18:1). I think about that verse whenever I’m tempted to retreat to the cardboard box I’ve written about, the place with nobody in it but me and God. Alone, there’s no one to notice my defensiveness. No one flinches when I snap, no one points out the pattern, no one asks why that particular topic makes me go cold. I could live with my wounds for decades and never be confronted by them.

Which means the very thing that makes relationships hard, the way they expose what isn’t healed, is also what makes them part of the healing. I didn’t heal from my mother alone in a room. I healed in a house full of people, one of whom took the phone out of my hand.

Where does that leave me, at forty-something, deciding whose mat to help carry?

Paul tells the Ephesians to walk “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (4:2). The word for patience is makrothumia, literally long-tempered, slow to boil over. And the word for bearing with is anechomai, to hold up under, to put up with. It isn’t glamorous. It’s the posture of someone who keeps holding the corner of the mat when their arms are tired.

None of us is exempt from needing that. My need at nineteen wasn’t greater than anyone else’s, only different, and I’ve had seasons since then when I needed patience far more than I gave it. Hardship comes in more flavors than any of us can count, and no one’s portion makes another person’s smaller.

But bearing with someone isn’t the same as boarding a boat that’s sinking because nobody aboard will touch the pump. I think there’s a difference between a person with holes who’s bailing and a person with holes who’s asking you to bail for them. The first I can help carry, at least one corner of the mat. The second is a question I can ask, kindly, the way Jesus asked it: do you want to be healed?

I don’t have a spare bedroom to offer anyone right now. I’m not sure I’d be able to give what Eric’s family gave me, even if I had one. What I can do is hold a corner, ask the question when it needs asking (and gently, because I’ve needed it asked of me), and stop expecting any one person, myself included, to carry the whole weight alone.

I think that’s what the four men knew. And I think that’s why there were four of them.