She Said: “I Need a Place to Stay”… He Replied: “And I Need a Wife to Bring Me Back to God”…

PART 2:

“You’ll be the Calloway widow.” He said. It was not a question. “Ruth.” She answered. He nodded, slow, the way a man nods when he knows the shape of grief without needing it explained. “What do you need?” “A place to stay.” She said.He wound the rope around his hand slow and she would learn in time that this was how he moved whenever he was thinking instead of doing.

  For a long moment he said nothing and then he spoke and it was not  what she expected and she would understand much later not what he had meant to say either. It came up out of some deep broken place before his pride could get a hand over its mouth.  “What I need,” he said, his voice rough as a rasp, “is a wife who can bring me back to God.

” The words hung in the cooling air  between them. Behind her, the gray dog shifted in the dust. “And what?” she said quietly. “If all I’ve got is a little girl, a worn-out  Bible, and two hands that aren’t afraid of work?” Something moved across his face. The look of a man who has said a thing a hundred times inside his own head and hears it out loud for the first time and does not recognize it.

“Then I said it  wrong,” he said. “You did.” He looked at the house, and then at a broken length of board lying in the yard, and only later would she understand what that board had been.”What I’ve got,” he said, plainer now, “is a spare room and more work than one man finishes before winter.

I can pay a fair wage and give you a roof. My wife’s been gone two winters. A house needs more than one soul in it, or it quits being a house.” He looked at the ground.  “I’m not good with saying what I mean. I know what I want. I just don’t know how to ask it without it sounding like I’m buying it.” “What is it you want,  then?” she asked gently.

 He looked up, and behind the flatness of his eyes, something living  stirred. “A family,” he said. “And I thought if there was somebody under this roof who still believed, maybe some of it might find its way back to me. I lost it, and I can’t find the road back on my own.” And there, at a stranger’s gate, with the sun going down and her child heavy against her, Ruth faced the oldest choice a proud  person meets in a desperate hour.

Pride told her to turn around. A decent woman does not walk into a widower’s house and take his wages and sleep beneath his roof and hand the whole county something to chew on. Pride  would rather sleep in a ditch than in a warm bed with its name in other mouths. But she looked down at her daughter’s face, gone thin these last hard months, the small fist  knotted in her collar even in sleep, and she heard her own mother’s voice from long ago,that pride is a fine thing to feed right up to the day it asks you to

starve your child to keep  it fed. She had set her pride down once before in another chapter of her life, one she did not speak of. She knew how it was done. “All right,” she said, “I’ll stay.I’ll earn my keep and my girl’s. And I’ll not hold you to a word you said just now that you didn’t mean.

A grieving man says things.I know that as well as anyone living.” He looked at her a moment as though she had surprised him, as if he’d braced for scorn or pity or  tears and had gotten instead something plain and steady he did not know what to do with. He held the door. She went in, and the inside of the house told her the rest of what the yard  had started.

 It was clean the way a man keeps a place clean when cleanliness is a chore and not a comfort, swept, bare, joyless. No cloth on the table, nothing in the window. The table itself was pushed  against the wall beneath the glass, set with one chair, the way a room arranges  itself when only one person has used it a long time.

She had lived that arrangement herself,  13 months of it, in a rented room above a store, the single cup,  the single plate, the silence that has a texture to it. She recognized this house. It was her own lonelinessbuilt larger in timber. He filled two cups with water and set one before her and sat across the bare table.

“I’ll say what I mean,” he said,”and I’ll expect the same.” “All right,” she said. And so it began, not with love, not with a vow,  but with two cups of plain water on a bare table and a widow with a Bible in her lap in the house of a man who had told the almighty to get off his land. That first night her daughter slept the deep sleep of a child who has quietly been afraid of being hungry.

And tonight is not. Sarah had eaten two full helpings and dropped off with a heel of bread still in her hand. And through the thin plank wall, Ruth heard a sound she had not expected from a man who carved a curse on his own gate. She heard him weeping. The strangled careful way a man weeps who has taught himself for a year not to and is losing the fight in the dark where he believes no one can hear.

She heard him speak two names into that dark. A woman’s name and then  softer, a child’s. She lay very still and did not go to him because some grief is not yours to walk into uninvited. But lying there in a stranger’s house with everything she owned in a bundle on the floor, Ruth had her own hard moment with heaven.

 Lord, she prayed, I have followed you this far because I did not know what else to do. I don’t understand why you’ve brought me  here to a house with a wall between me and a weeping man and no answer on either side of it. I still believe you, but tonight I am tired and I am afraid and I do not know where you are taking me.

   And then because she had learned long ago that faith is not the absence of that question, but the choosing to lie down anyway. She held the Bible to her chest in the dark and she slept. In the days that followed, she learned the shape of the ranch before she learned the whole of the man. He rose before light and worked past  the point of seeing.

She took the kitchen and the garden and the ledger he kept in the cramped hand of someone who understood numbers far better  than words. She earned her wage and tucked it week by week into a tin box under a loose floorboard, a habit learned in a marriage she did not  speak of, that money you hold entirely as a safer thing than money you merely have.

And in the evenings, when the work was done, there was the porch and the pasture  going violet and then dark. And two people in two chairs that had begun set well apart. And without either of them deciding it,week by week, were not so far apart as they had been.

 On the third evening, she carried two cups of coffee out without being asked. He looked at the second cup a moment, then took his and drank it and said nothing. It was the smallest thing. It was everything. On the fifth evening,  he told her about his wife. Not as a speech, but folded into a single sentence because Ruth had asked carefully about the gray horse kept alone in the far paddock.

That was  hers, he said. She rode it first thing every morning before the chores. Said mornings were too good to waste. He held his cup  and looked out at the pasture, not at her. I haven’t decided what to do with him. Ruth looked at the patient gray  standing alone in the last of the light.

She was right about the mornings, she said, and she deserved more of them than she got. Yes, he said simply.  She did. That was all. But it was the first door he had opened even a crack. And Ruth had the wisdom not to push it wider than  he had. It was the neighbor who pried the rest of it into the open.

On a gray morning, a man rode up the track, Josiah Bell, whose land lay to the east, with the smile that never once reached his  eyes, and an interest in Caleb’s fence lines and his creek that Ruth did not yet understand. He tipped his hat and called her Mrs. Warren with a slow, deliberate malice meant to put color in her face.

And when Caleb came around  the barn and told him, low and flat, to get off the property, Josiah only laughed down from the saddle. Still sulking at the almighty Caleb. A whole year of it. Mary wouldn’t know you. Nor would the boy. Caleb went white to the lips. And Josiah wheeled his horse and rode off laughing, and his dust hung red over the road a long while after.

That night Ruth knocked softly on his door. And Caleb Warren, perhaps too worn to carry it one more night alone, perhaps because a kind presence under his roof had loosened  what a year of solitude had frozen, told her the whole of it. His wife had been Hannah. Eight years married. And the boy,the small chair shrouded under a sheet in the front room, the chair she had noticed and not asked about, the boy’s name had been Samuel,  and he had been five.

And he’d had his mother’s laugh. One year ago, near this very week, the fever came down on the county. It came fast, faster than any doctor could ride. Both of them took sick inside 2 days. And on the worst night, with Hannah  burning and the boy already gone too quiet, Caleb had done the only thing a man can do.

He saddled his fastest horse and rode for the doctor  in the black of night. And he prayed the whole way. Every prayer his mother ever taught him. Every word he had. Promising God everything a man has to promise. He rode back at dawn with the doctor behind him, up his own track as the sun broke, and he was already too late.

He lost them  both before the light was full. His wife and his only child, gone inside a single week. While he was out on the road begging heaven for their lives. He did not need  to finish it. Ruth read the rest in the way his big hands gripped his own knees at that bare table, white at the knuckle.

Holding himself together by main strength. “I prayed the whole night on that road,” he said. And there was no feeling at all in his voice, which was worse than if he had wept. “And I came home to two bodies going cold. So I quit. I took down sign outside the church where I’d been a deacon 11 years, the one that said all are welcome, and I rode home and nailed up my own.

 Because if he would not hear me on the one night in my life I truly begged, then he and I had nothing left to say. The fire popped. Outside the wind moved over the dark prairie the way it has since before there were any men on it to grieve. And Ruth, who had stood at her own husband’s grave,who had watched hard men take her farm with a paper and a pen, who knew the exact killing weight of the easy things comfortable people say to the grieving,said none of them.

She did not tell him it was God’s plan. She did not tell him the boy was in a better place. She let the silence sit. And then she gave him the only true thing she had. Caleb, you didn’t stop praying. He looked up, something near anger in it. The day I came, she said steady,  you stood in your own yard and told a stranger you needed help finding your way back to God.

That was a prayer, as real as any you cried on that road. On the road you were asking him to change what he was doing. That day you were finally asking him to change you. And I have read that  book more times than I can count, and I have never once found the place where he turns away from that prayer. He’s the shepherd who leaves the 99 safe on the hill and goes out into the dark and the cold after the one that wandered off.

That’s the whole of it, Caleb. That’s the entire point of the story.Him out in the weather, looking for the one who is sure he’s lost. He said nothing to that, but she saw  it. The first thin line of light beneath a door bolted a year. And in the gray of the next morning when she came out to start the  stove, the sign was down.

It lay in the frost-stiffened grass wrenched clean in two, where a man had gone out in the dark and torn it loose with his bare hands. Neither of them said a word about it, but something had begun and both of them felt it and neither dared yet to name it. For the truest things between two wounded, careful  people are always built that way, through what is done without being asked and what is seen without being named.

 Now, I will pause only a moment because Ruth’s  name is no accident. 3,000 years before a widow ever walked a Kansas road,  the book tells of another Ruth, a foreigner, a widow with nothing, who went into the fields of a hard country to gather the leftover grain just to stay alive.  And the field she happened into belonged to a man named Boaz, who could have used her or ignored her as men did, and instead chose to protect her.

He left extra grain for her on purpose. He covered her, in the old and beautiful language of that book, with the corner of his garment,which meant, “Take shelter here. You are not alone anymore.” And out of that one quiet mercy in a barley field came a marriage, and a son, and four generations on, a king, and generations beyond that, in a stable, the savior of the world.

That is what God has always been willing to do with widows and lonely men on the far edges of things. It is never once been a small thing to him.Now, Josiah Bell had land and water on his mind and a patient,greedy plan. And Josiah Bell was no Boaz. By then, Ruth had been at the ranch some weeksand had come to understand, the way you sense a change of weather before you can name it, that something had shifted in her own guarded heart, that what she had walked into out of raw

need had quietly  become the thing she would now choose over any other. But the same weeks had shifted something in Josiah, too. The clean, steady creek  that ran through the heart of Caleb’s land was the only reliable water for miles in a dry country. And the law over such water was a tangle loose enough for a patient, greedy man to twist.

He had been twisting it since Hannah and the boy died because a grieving man, alone and broken, with no one to witnessand no heart left to fight, is the easiest prey there is. Josiah had built his whole plan on Caleb staying broken.  What he had not reckoned on was a widow with a Bible pushing that gate open.

The first blow came on a hard, cold  morning. A dozen head of cattle woke on the wrong side of a fence cut clean in the night. Cut with a tool by a hand that meant it. It took two full days of riding to gather  the strays out of the draws. Two days Josiah knew a man could not spare with winter coming.

 And here Ruth saw the first  proof that something in Caleb was truly changing. He did not sharpen his fury over supper. He did not curse the name. He sat by the fire that night and read silently, his lips  barely moving. A man teaching himself the road home one verse at a time. And then came  the fire.

 On a dry afternoon with a hard wind out of the west, it started in the tall dead grass of the east pasture. On its own, they would  say. And it ran for the barn and the winter hay with a speed that stole the breath from your chest. Ruth saw the smoke first, a low brown wall of it boiling up. She called Caleb’s  name once and then never again because screaming would not save a blade of grass and there was no time for it.

 What happened next she would tell her grandchildren and they would tell theirs.  Caleb ran for the flames with a soaked blanket, but it was Ruth  who thought, who ran the other way to the plow, who backed the horse into the traces with her hands shaking too hard to buckle the harness cleanly,  and drove that plow straight across the fire’s path and cut a break.

A raw strip of turned bare earth with nothing left on it for the flames to eat. She plowed that line with the fire close enough to scorch her skirts and pull the water from her eyes and she did not turn the team and she did not look back. And on the far side, Caleb beat at  the flames and the two of them worked toward one another through a roaring orange wall.

Each catching sight of the other through the smoke and neither willing to be the one who fell back. And then it rained.  I will not tell you that as a fairy tale because they would not have wanted it told to you false. It was not a bolt from a clear sky. The clouds had been building in the west the whole long afternoon.

Any farmer with his eyes open would have seen them stacking up. And that is how the Lord most often works. Not by breaking the laws of the sky he made, but by ordering their timing. The rain broke at the very minute the break held  and the fire guttered down against the bare earth, hard and cold and drenching,hissing on the coals.

And it drowned what was left of Josiah Bell’s work  dead in the mud. And Caleb Warren dropped to his knees right there in the steaming black muck of his saved pasture, soaked through, his hands blistered raw. And for the first  time in a year, without deciding to, without a plan or a scrap of pride left to stop him, he bowed his head and lifted his face into the falling rain and his shoulders shook and he prayed.

 Ruth stood on the far side of the break with soot and rain and tears running together down her face. And she saw his lips move. And she did not go to him.And she did not call out. And she did not ask him then or ever what he said. Some words between a broken man and the God  he thought had left him are not meant for any other ear on this earth.

She only stood in the rainand watched a man come home. And in her own heart she said just this. Thank you. He heard him. He heard him all  along. Josiah made the mistake that greed and pride have always made. He grew too sure of himself, and he came in person.  Two days after the fire, he rode up with two hired men and a forged deed.

And he sat his horse in the yard and told Caleb to sign  over the creek. “Before,” he said with that smile that never touched his eyes, “something worse than a grass fire finds that new family of yours. A woman, a little girl. Fire’s an unpredictable thing  on these plains.” And that, the threat aimed square at the child asleep in the  house, was the thing that went too far.

Caleb walked into the house without a word, and came back out with his rifle. And he levered a round into the chamber, and the sound of it was loud in the cold still yard.  And here, friend, this story could have turned in one heartbeat into a tragedy, like a hundred others the frontier has swallowed.

A grieving, furious man, a loaded  gun, a wicked man who had God knows earned whatever was coming. It would have felt to many a soul listening to me right now entirely just. Ruth came down  off the porch and laid one hand on his arm, and she did not say don’t. She said the harder thing. “If you pull that trigger,  Caleb, you make him right.

Every ugly word he said about you, that you’re a broken,  lawless, godless man with nothing left to lose, you make all of it true with one pull.  And it isn’t true. I’ve seen who you are. You’re the man who plowed toward me through the middle of a fire and wouldn’t fall back. You’re the man who knelt in the mud and finally came home.

Don’t let this small wicked man  turn you back into the thing he needs you to be. Vengeance belongs to the Lord. He said so  himself, and he’s far better at it than you or I will ever be. Keep your soul, Caleb. Let the law have the rest. But understand this clearly, it was not Ruth who lowered that rifle.

She only held up  a mirror. It was Caleb. For a long, long moment while nothing in that yard moved and the whole prairie seemed to hold its breath,who made the choice himself. He lowered the gun. He set its butt against the frozen dirt, and he looked Josiah Bell dead in the eye. “Get off my land.

” He said in a voice steadier than the rifle had been. “You’ll get your answer from the county and from the almighty.  You’ll not get it from me. Because the real victory in that yard was never the water and it was never the land. The real victory was a grieving man refusing to become the thing his grief had almost made of him.

” And Josiah, who had come for a signature or a gunfight and gotten neither,did not know on this earth what to do with a man who simply would not be moved. He wheeled his horse and rode out. And the smile was gone off his face. And then Caleb did a thing that took more courage  than the rifle ever could.

 The next morning he saddled his horse and rode into town, the same long road he had once ridden in the dark to beg God for two lives, and he walked into the church he had swore he would never enter again. He walked in during the Sunday service, dust  of the road still on him, in front of every soul who had watched him carve a curse on his own gateand turn his back on God and neighbor for a bitter year.

 And he took off his hat.And he stood at the back with it crushed in his two blistered hands and he asked them for help. He told them the whole of it. And that congregation, the very people whose casseroles he had left to spoil on his porch, whose letters he had burned unopened,whose reaching hands he had struck away in the depth of his grief, that congregation spoke  not one word of judgment.

Old Reverend Ames came down the aisle on his cane and laid a trembling hand on his shoulder,and the whole church rose to its feet. Not for the water, for him. Because that is  what the body of the faithful is built to do. And it had been aching a full year for this one lost sheep to walk back through the door and let himself be found.

And what brought Josiah Bell down in the end was not a bullet.It was an old book and the long memory of an old preacher. For Reverend Ames,who had buried Hannah and Samuel with his own hands, also kept the register of the whole community,as frontier pastors often did, being frequently the only soul able to read and write for many miles.

And folded into the back of it, in the faded hand of the first circuit rider ever to serve that country, was the written record of exactly where the waters ran when the first settlers came, more than 20 years before. Josiah did not know those records existed, but they did. And they proved,  in ink older than his whole wicked claim, that the creek had run through Warren land since before he ever rode into that county.

When the marshal came  out, with the Reverend beside him, the old register under his arm,and half the congregation strung out behind on the road, everyone ready to swear an oath, Josiah understood too late that he had gotten wrong the one thing that mattered. He had staked everything on a single belief, that Caleb Warren stood alone.

  But Caleb was not alone anymore, and had not been since a widow with a Bible pushed a cursed gate open. Josiah’s forged deed did not  survive 10 minutes of the marshal’s plain reading of it. And when one of his own men broke,white and shaking at the nearness of the gallows, and told the truth of the cut fence and the fire, Josiah Bell left the county in irons, in the back of a jolting wagon, down the same road a widow had once walked in on with nothing but a child and a book.

When a man’s ways please the Lord, the proverb says, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him. And the wicked are snared by the work of their own hands.” It was the child who finally  forced the conversation the two grown people had circled for weeks like two shy horses.

 One evening deep in December with the first real snow falling past the window and the ledger open on the table, little Sarah, who had lately taken to climbing into Caleb’s lap  of an evening as though it were the most settled place in the world, looked up into his face and asked the thing the grown-ups had not the courage to say.

 “Are you going to be my papa now?” The silence in that warm kitchen went so deep you could hear the fire and the snow against the glass, both. Caleb looked over the child’s fair-headed Ruth, who had stopped stone  still with the spoon halfway out of the pot. And he answered the little girl, but he never once took his eyes off the mother.

“That’s not for me to say all on my own, little one. That’s for your mama, too.” And Ruth set down the spoon. “Caleb,” she said, coming around the table to him. “That first day at the gate, you told me you needed a wife to bring you back to God.And I’ve been waiting a long while to tell you something, and I need you to hear it plain.

 The way you always ask a thing said.” He waited. “I did not bring you back to God,” she said, and her voice broke on it. “I want you to know that because it’s the  truest thing I know. God brought me to you. You were already coming home since the night  you knelt in the mud, since before that, since the night you prayed on that road so sure that no one heard. But he heard you, Caleb.

 He was never once not hearing you.He only answered the way he answers, in his own time, by his own strange road. And his answer took  a whole year and a hard road and a hungry little girl to reach your gate. You asked for a wife to bring you back  to God, but it was God all along bringing a wife back to you.

 And Caleb Warren, the man who had carved no God  here with his own hand, took that work-worn hand in both of his while the snow came down soft over all his land. “When I first said what I needed,” he told her, “slow and sure now. I said it wrong. And you told me so to my face, and you were right. I was trying to buy back a life death had taken.

But that’s not what I need. What I need is already standing in this kitchen, and has been since the day you walked through that  gate, and I’ve been too full of grief and too much a coward to say so. So, I won’t ask you the way I did that first day.” He drew a breath.  “Ruth, marry me. Not for a wage, not for a roof, not as an arrangement between two  lonely people making the best of a hard world.

 Marry me because I don’t want to face one more winter or one more morning in this house without the two of you in it. Because that book you  carried through my gates as a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. You and me  and the God you would not leave outside no matter what my sign said. And marry me because I want to spend the rest of my one life finding out  at your side who the man is that God isn’t finished making of me yet.

” And Ruth wept, and then she laughed  the real laugh, the one he’d first heard over the bread, and she said yes. They were married in the town church in the first week of spring at the same rail where Caleb  had once knelt in the black of grief to bury a wife and a son. Old Reverend Ames, his hands trembling now with age and with joy, declared them man and wife and told the risen congregation that in 40 years of ministryhe had never once seen the Lord write a story in a hand so strange and so

perfect. A family taken away in a single bitter week, and a new one given back in the fullness of his own time. Ruth wore her  mother’s dark green dress, the one she had worn on the hardest day of her life, not because it was  her only good one. She had sewn finer over the winter, but because it had  been on her the day she had nothing, and she wanted it on her now, on the day the Lord showed her what all that nothing had quietly been for.

The small rocking chair came down out of the front room that spring. It was not thrown away. Caleb would sooner have burned the barn. He carried it up to the attic himself, careful as a man carries something both enormous and unbearably fragile, and he set it where the morning  light came in, and he stood alone up there a long while, and no one asked him what he said.

And in the empty place where it had stood shrouded a year, he set a new little chair, a  bright one, just Sarah’s size. The little girl who had asked, “Are you going to be my papa now?” had one, and she called him papa to the end of his days, and he answered to it every time, and every time some small broken thing in him finished quietly mending  itself whole.

And the Bible, the same worn Bible she had held against her chest the failing day she pushed  the gate open, Ruth sat on the mantel over the fire, and there it stayed, open, always. Every evening one of the three of them read from it aloud, and more and more it was Caleb who read.His voice still rough at the edges, but steadier and warmer with each passing week, reading out the very words he could not one year before  so much as look upon.

 He read them the story of the widow Ruth in the fields of Boaz, and every time he reached the verse where she says, “I will go where you go,and your God will be my God.” He would look up across the fire at his own Ruth, and neither of them ever managed it with dry eyes, and after a while they gave up trying.

 The following summer a second child  was born in that house at first light, a boy red and furiously alive. And they named him Samuel  because Caleb asked quietly the night before whether he might. And Ruth understood exactly what the asking cost himand what the giving would heal. And she said yes before he had finished.

The gray horse was never sold. It lived out its gentle days in the far paddock. And it was on that gray that Sarah learned to ride on the good mornings because mornings, as someone who had once lived in that house had rightly said, are too good to waste.  And the lean gray dog that had growled once at the gate and then sat down to wait slept at the foot of Sarah’s bed every night of its faithful  life as though watching over this mended family were the one holy work it had been placed on the earth to do. Years

later, when folks asked Ruth how she came to meet her husband, she told them about the gate and the sign  that once said, “No God here.” And the broken man who, in the very minute a widow asked him only for a place to stay, asked her back, without meaning to, for the one thing far greater than shelter. And she always ended the same way.

“People think faith is being certain God will do the thing you ask,” she would say, her hand resting on that worn book. But it isn’t. Faith is walking on down the road even when you’re sure no one is listening because sometimes, far more often  than you dare believe, the answer to the prayer you sobbed in the dark is already up ahead of you out mending a fence in the last of  the light, just waiting on you to find the courage to push one more gate open.

That gate had  meant one thing the day she came to it. Rejection, a curse, a locked and grieving heart. Then it had meant another, a frightened widow choosing against all her  pride to walk through. And in the end it meant the truest thing of all, that God had been standing on the other side of it the whole time before either of them understood what he was doing.

And I believe  that is true, friend, not only for a widow and a rancher on the old Kansas frontier, but for you tonight,  wherever you are sitting and listening to my voice. Perhaps you’re on a long road right now, carrying more than two hands were meant to hold, waiting on an answer that feels as though it is never going to come.

Perhaps you have buried someone you do not know how to live without. Perhaps the house is quiet in a way it never  used to be, and there is a chair at your table that no one fills, and you have begun to wonder in the long evenings whether your best years are behind you, and whether anyone still needs you at all.

 Perhaps you have prayed so long that you have started to fear the silence means he has stopped listening.Hear me, then. And hear the whole of God’s word behind me. He is a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows,  and he sets the lonely in families. He has not forgotten you. He has never once forgotten you.

His silence is not his absence. Sometimes the answer to your prayer is already moving toward you while you are still grieving.And sometimes what looks to you like the end of your story is only the place where he is quietly beginning another chapter. So, do not give up before  the next gate.

 You cannot yet see what is standing on the other side of it, but he can. And he is not finished with you. So, tell me down in the comments tonight, where in this wide world are you listening from? And have you ever lived long enough to see God answer a prayer  in a way you never expected, by a road you never would have chosen? Tell me your testimony.

I read every one, and every one moves me. And until we meet again in the next story, may the Lord bless you and keep you, and may his face to shine upon you and your whole house. Keep the faith, and keep walking toward the gate.