She Cannot Enjoy a Good Day

It is the last warm Saturday of the year and everybody knows it, which is why three families are out in three back yards along the same row and all of them can hear each other.

Somebody two doors down is grilling. The smell arrives over the fence in waves. Her daughter and a friend have been on the trampoline for fifty minutes and have invented a game with rules that keep changing and a scoring system nobody could explain. A dog belonging to nobody in particular has come through the gap in the hedge twice.

She is in a folding chair with a mug of tea she has forgotten about, and the sun is exactly where it is best, low and gold and coming through the neighbor's tree.

It is a good afternoon. She can see that it is a good afternoon. She is watching it the way you watch something through glass.

Because underneath, quietly, without her permission, the arithmetic is running.

If it comes back, this is the afternoon I will think about. If the scan in November says what the last one said, this is the day I will play over. And every minute she lets herself sink into this is a minute that will cost more later, because the drop from a good afternoon is further than the drop from an ordinary one.

So she stays at ordinary. Deliberately. It is a kind of management.

Her daughter shouts something about the score and she says well done in a voice that is warm and slightly automatic.

And she notices her hands.

They are in her lap and they are both fists, the way they have been on and off since March. Thumbs tucked inside the fingers, the way children do it. Not tight. Just closed. She has no idea how long they have been like that and she cannot think of a single thing she was bracing for at three o'clock on a Saturday.

The dog comes back through the hedge.

That is you. The worst of it has passed, or the worst of it has paused, and you are still standing braced. Everybody has started saying how well you look. Somebody used the word "behind you" last week and you smiled. And you have quietly stopped letting anything land, because landing costs, and you have already paid once and you know the price now.

Two things before anything else. This is not a failure of faith, and I am not going to tell you to relax. Nobody is going to be talked out of bracing by a paragraph. And I am not going to explain what happened to you in March, or tell you it was for something. I do not know why it happened, and a reason handed over at this point is not comfort even when it is meant kindly.

Your life is not kept in the room where the next thing happens

There is one sentence in Colossians that answers the arithmetic directly, and it does it without once telling you to cheer up.

Paul is writing to people under real pressure, and he does not open with encouragement. He tells them where their life is currently being kept, as a matter of location.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

Hid. Not protected in the sense of guarded at the door. Put somewhere. Stored. The word is about a location that other people cannot get at.

You are living out of a place that November cannot reach into. That is not a comforting idea I am adding to your afternoon: Colossians 3:3 puts the life inside Christ and inside God, two enclosures deep, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that an address rather than a metaphor for a woman in a folding chair.

And notice the tense. Not shall be hidden, once the results are good. Is hid. It was done, past, finished, before she ever sat down in the yard, and the scan in November had no vote in it.

You have a life that is already stored somewhere, and the storing was not conditional on the year going well. The written word puts it in the perfect tense, done and standing done (Colossians 3:3), and His Spirit is the one who makes a completed thing land in a body that is still braced.

If the bracing has gone into your sleep, your jaw, your chest, your stomach, that is worth taking to a doctor and worth taking to somebody trained to sit with people after a year like yours. Those are good, ordinary rooms and there is nothing unspiritual about walking into one.

I am not asking you to stop bracing

Let me be plain about this, because a page like this can quietly turn into one more person telling you to be at peace.

The bracing is not a sin. It is not small faith. It is what a body does after it has been hit once and was not expecting it, and it is doing its honest best so that nothing catches you unprepared like that twice. There is nothing about it that needs confessing.

I am also not going to tell you that nothing else is coming. I do not know. Nobody who tells you they know is telling you the truth, and I am not going to buy your afternoon with a promise I have no right to make.

You are held by Someone the next thing has to come through first, whatever the next thing is. Scripture puts the life inside Christ rather than inside the circumstances around it (Colossians 3:3), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that difference felt rather than merely argued.

What I would like to change is not the bracing. It is what those fists think they are holding.

Look at the fists again. Thumbs tucked in. Whatever is being gripped there, it is not your life, because your life is not in your hands. It is somewhere else, and it was moved there without your assistance, and it is being kept by Someone who does not go off duty in November.

You were placed in that hiding place before this year started and you have not been moved out of it since. The word that is written says hid, past and settled (Colossians 3:3), and the same Spirit who sealed that arrangement is in the yard this afternoon with the trampoline going and the dog coming back through the hedge.