The Handrail on the Back Stairs

There are two ways down from the fourth floor and everybody in that building takes the elevator, which is why Rosalind takes the stairs.

Not for exercise. She would say that if you asked, because it is the answer that ends the conversation. The real reason is that the back stairwell is the only two minutes in her working day when nobody can reach her. No phone signal in the middle flights, no colleagues, nobody putting their head round a door.

Four flights, half landings, painted rail, a window at the top that lights the whole thing.

She has done it for six years.

It arrives on the second landing, most days. Not every day. Enough days that she can predict it.

I am not going to name it and I am not going to guess. It is not this article's business and there is no paragraph coming that describes a category, so you can stop reading ahead for one.

What has changed in the last year is not the pull. The pull has been the same for a long time and she has walked down those stairs with it more often than she has not.

What has changed is that she has started to expect herself to fall.

It begins now on the first flight, before anything arrives. A kind of bracing. A weary anticipation, and underneath it a sentence that has become almost automatic: here we go, and we know how this ends.

She is forty-three and she has become a woman who rehearses her own failure four flights at a time.

And today, on the second half landing, in the middle of it, she notices something so ordinary that she nearly laughs.

Her hand is on the rail.

Her hand has been on that rail every single working day for six years. Down four flights, twice a day sometimes. She has never once thought about it. She has never decided to hold it and she has never had a single thought about what it is for, and it is there, painted, bolted through into the block wall, holding.

You have that rehearsal. Yours might not run on a staircase. But you know the bracing, and you know the sentence underneath it, and you know when it started.

The hardest short letter in the book ends here

Jude is twenty-five verses long and it is not a comfortable read. It is a letter about people who went badly wrong, and it names them, and it uses some of the fiercest imagery in the New Testament to do it.

And then it stops warning, and this is how it ends.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.Jude 24

Now unto him that is able.

Able is a capability word. Jude is not saying God is willing to try, or that He will help if you help yourself. He is making a statement about what is within God's power, and he makes it at the end of a letter entirely about people who fell.

That is where the sentence sits. Not in a letter about easy circumstances. At the close of the bleakest short document in the New Testament, aimed at people who had just watched others go down.

You are being kept by Someone whose capability is stated as the last word of that letter. That is the written word and not my comfort on a stairwell, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a doxology written after a page of warnings and lays it on a half landing on a Tuesday afternoon.

And read the verb. To keep you from falling.

Not to help you keep yourself. Not to give you what you need to manage it. To keep you, which is His action with you as the object of it, and that is the only construction available in that sentence.

And to present you faultless with exceeding joy

Now the second half, because it answers a fear you have not put into words.

And to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.

Faultless. That is where this ends up.

And then three words that nobody expects: with exceeding joy.

Whose joy? Read the sentence again and see if you can make it belong to anybody but the One doing the presenting. He is the subject of every verb in it. He is able. He keeps. He presents. And He does the last one with exceeding joy.

The picture at the end of Jude is God delighted at the arrival.

Which matters enormously for a woman on a staircase who has spent a year rehearsing her own fall, because underneath the rehearsal there is a second and quieter assumption, and it goes: whatever happens on those stairs, when I finally arrive, the reception is going to be cold.

Jude says exceeding joy, and puts it in the same sentence as the keeping.

This is yours, and the arrival is described as joyful before you ever get there, and it is already settled. Jude 24 says with exceeding joy in exactly those words, and the same Spirit named in verse twenty as the one you pray in is the one making it a present fact in a woman with her hand on a painted rail.

Now let me guard this properly, because this is the category where careless writing does real damage.

I am not telling you it does not matter what happens on those stairs. It matters, and Jude is a letter that takes conduct extremely seriously, and I am not going to hand you twenty-four verses of warning and then pretend verse twenty-four cancels them.

And I am not ranking anything and I am not guessing. This article does not know what yours is.

And this most of all: the fact that you have been bracing does not mean you are further from God than the woman who takes the elevator. There is nothing in Scripture that reads the strength of a person's fight as a measurement of their standing, and the rehearsal in you is not a diagnosis, it is a habit that grew in a hard year.