The call came while she was still in the car park with the engine off, and afterwards she went into the shop, because she had driven all the way there and the list was in her hand and there was no other plan available.
Now she is standing in front of the freezers with both hands on the trolley handle.
The list says four things. She can read every word on it and not one of them means anything. Somebody reaches past her for peas and says sorry love, and she says no you're all right in a voice that comes out completely normal, which is its own strange horror. The tannoy asks for a supervisor to the deli counter. Two boys are arguing about crisps. A woman further down is holding two jars up and comparing them, taking her time about it, because it is an ordinary Tuesday afternoon and she has all the time in the world.
That is the part nobody prepares you for. The shop carries on being a shop.
Your ground moved, and the earth did not so much as pause to notice. The lights stayed on. The freezers kept humming. Somebody in the world is still choosing between two jars.
You know that aisle. Maybe it was a corridor, or a kitchen with the phone still warm in your hand, or a car park with the engine off. Yours came on a Tuesday or a Thursday or the morning of somebody's birthday, and since then nothing has been the same, and you have been going through the days in a body that keeps saying no you're all right to people.
Nobody is going to tell you why this happened. Not on this page. There is a kind of comfort that arrives holding a reason, and it is not comfort, and I am not bringing you one.
Nobody is asking you to be calm
Let that be said first, and plainly, because the opposite has probably been said to you three times this week by people who love you.
Being held does not require you to be steady in yourself. That is not the arrangement. The steadiness in Scripture is never described as a quality the frightened person manufactures and then presents as proof.
Look at how David talks in the psalm this comes from. He says God alone is his rock and his fortress and that he shall not be greatly shaken. And then, in the very next breath, he describes himself as a leaning wall and a tottering fence.
Both. In the same psalm. Within two lines of each other.
You are held right now by something that is not your composure, and it is holding while you shake. That is not my encouragement to you; the psalm puts the rock outside the man and then lets the man admit he is leaning (Psalm 62:2 to 3), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that hold real in a person rather than the amount of steadiness they can find. A leaning wall that is tied to bedrock is still tied to bedrock.
He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken.Psalm 62:2
What is under your hand
Here is a distinction worth having on a day like this one, and it is small enough to carry.
There is what is shaking, and there is what stands underneath, and in the last few days those two have become the same thing in your mind. That is not a failure of faith. It is what a shaking does. When the ground moves, everything that was resting on the ground moves with it, and it takes a while to work out that not everything was resting on the ground.
The plans were on the ground. The five year picture was on the ground. The assumption that this particular thing would hold, that was very much on the ground.
God was not on the ground.
You were standing on Him the whole time without knowing which of it was which, and you are standing on Him now that you do. That is what is written of a rock that is not part of the landscape it holds up, and the Holy Spirit is what makes the difference between the two obvious to a person in the middle of an aisle.
You have a footing that the last few days did not touch, and it is under you at this moment. Scripture calls Him a rock and a high fortress, which are both words for something that was there before the trouble and is unaffected by it, and His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to stand on it while the rest is still moving. He has not moved. Not an inch, not this week.
And notice what the psalm does not do. It does not tell the leaning wall that the leaning is finished. Nowhere in it does David announce that the assault has stopped. He is still in it while he says the rock is a rock.
You are allowed to say the true thing about God in the middle of it, and you were never asked to wait until the aisle stopped tilting. That permission is written into the shape of Psalm 62 itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts a sentence like that in the mouth of somebody who is not yet steady enough to mean it comfortably.
So nothing is being asked of you today that is the size of your crisis. That would be absurd. You cannot lift the crisis. Nobody is handing you the crisis.
What is being offered is the size of an afternoon.
One thing under your hand. One immovable point in a valley that is still moving. Not an explanation, not a plan, not a five year picture rebuilt, and certainly not a prediction about how any of this turns out, because I do not know and I will not pretend to.
You are held to the One who has not moved, and being held does not require you to hold on well. The written word makes the fortress the actor and the sheltering person the one sheltered, and the Holy Spirit is called the helper precisely because helping is what He came to do. This is not a grip you have to maintain with fingers that are shaking.
You have a refuge that takes people in the state they are actually in, and you were never required to arrive presentable. That is what is written at the end of the same psalm, and His Spirit is what carries a person through a door they can barely see.
And the psalm says one more thing that belongs here. Pour out your heart before Him. Not tidy it up first. Pour it out, in whatever state it is in, because He is a refuge and refuges are for people arriving in a mess.
One plain thing before we go on, said warmly rather than clinically. If this week has taken you somewhere darker than shock, if the thought of not being here has come and sat down beside you in the car, tell one living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line: 988 in the United States, or the emergency number where you live. A shaken person needs a human being in the room, and reaching for one is good sense and never a small faith.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud where you are standing, and say them badly if that is how they come out. The right to speak over your own afternoon is yours because you are in Christ and Christ is in you; the authority is His, delegated, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the words live rather than how steady your voice is. And notice what David actually does in that psalm. Twice he turns and speaks to his own soul in the second person, out loud, telling it where to wait (Psalm 62:5). He does not think it at himself. He says it. That is the appointed means, and the outcome is His.
- Tuesday that took the ground out, you are not what I am standing on. Scripture says God alone is the rock and the high fortress, and a rock does not consult the week before it holds.
- Fear that I am the thing that is failing, you do not get to sit in my chest in this aisle. In the name of Jesus I hand you across to the One whose word calls a man a leaning wall and holds him anyway, and His Spirit is what keeps me upright while I lean.
- Lord, You have not moved, and I am held to You this afternoon with both hands on a trolley handle. I thank You, because what You have written never once asked a shaking person to be calm before You would hold them, and Your Spirit is the steadiness I do not have. What is shaking is not what I am standing on.
Psalm 62:2
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