She Cannot Let Them Out of Sight

The other parents are on the bench. She is at the bottom of the slide.

It is the good hour, five o'clock or a little after, when the light comes in sideways through the trees at the edge of the lot and lands on the wood chips and turns the whole playground the color of weak tea. Somebody has brought a bag of pretzels. There is a coffee on the arm of the bench with her name written on the cup in marker, and it has been there long enough to be cold, because she carried it over from the truck and then did not sit down.

She has not sat down in three months.

Her daughter is on the climbing frame, seven years old and entirely fine, going up the outside of it the way children do, and her son is somewhere behind her on the little bridge and she knows exactly where because she counted eleven seconds ago and she will count again in a moment.

Nobody else is standing here. She is aware of this. It is not that the other mothers are careless, and she knows that too. They are eight or nine steps away on a bench, laughing about somebody's dog, glancing up now and then the way people do, and that used to be her. She used to sit on that bench with her legs crossed and her back to half the playground and it never once occurred to her to count.

Now she stands where she can see both of them without turning her head. She has worked out the exact place. It is a little to the left of the slide, and from there the climbing frame and the bridge are in the same view, and she has been standing in it for forty minutes.

She would like to sit down. That is the part she cannot explain to anybody. It is not that she is frightened, exactly, not in the way she was in March. The worst of it has passed. Everyone says so and they are right.

It is that some part of her has taken a post and has not been relieved of it, and every time she thinks about walking eight steps to the bench, something in her chest says not yet, and she stays.

That is you, standing a little to the left of the slide.

Maybe you are not at a playground. Maybe you check the locks twice, or you cannot let the phone go to voicemail, or you read the mail standing up in the driveway because you would rather know in the driveway than in the kitchen. Maybe you are fine all day and then lie there at half past two doing a survey of everybody you love.

The worst of it has passed and your shoulders have not heard.

Two things and then I will stay a while.

The first is that the bracing is not a spiritual failure. It is what a nervous system does after something actually happened. Nobody is going to call it faithlessness here, and if that has been suggested to you, it was wrong.

The second is that I am not going to tell you there will not be another one. I do not know that. Nobody who has told you it is all behind you now knows that either, and I think some part of you has been aware of it and has been standing at the bottom of the slide about it.

Who is keeping the watch

There is a short psalm that David appears to have written at night, and the last line of it has been read as a description of a calm man, which it is not.

In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.Psalm 4:8

Read it in its own context and it is a good deal stranger than the wall plaque version. The psalm opens with distress. It has people in it who are actively slandering him. Nothing in the eight verses says the trouble resolved, or that the men went away, or that the situation improved by evening.

And then he lies down and sleeps.

Sleep is the most defenseless thing a human body does. You cannot watch while you do it. You cannot count anybody, and you cannot see the climbing frame and the bridge in the same view, and every parent who has ever lain awake at half past two knows precisely what it costs to hand over the watch.

You are looked after by Somebody who does not require you to stay on post for it to be true. Psalm 4:8 puts the making dwell in safety on God alone, in those words, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that something a body can act on rather than a sentence a person agrees with and then goes on standing.

Look at that word alone. You alone make me dwell in safety.

It is not a shared arrangement in which He does the big things and you do the eleven second count. It is not a rota. The psalm gives the whole of it to Him, in one line, and it never once tells the man his vigilance was the problem.

You were never actually the thing holding your children up, and that was as true in the good years as it is at five o'clock this afternoon. What is written puts the keeping in God's hands and puts it there alone, and His Spirit is the one who lets that arrive as relief instead of as an accusation about the way you have been standing.

Because that is the tender part of this, and I want to get it right. The bracing feels like a job you have taken on, but it is not really a job. It is a body that learned something in March and has not been told it can stand down.

You have not been assigned this watch, and nothing in Scripture hands it to you. Psalm 4:8 makes God the one who makes a person dwell in safety, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to relax before He does it. Nobody is grading your posture at the bottom of a slide.

What was never promised

I am not going to do the thing that has probably been done to you three times already, which is to declare it over on your behalf.

Nobody who says that to you knows. They are being kind and they are guessing, and some part of you can hear the guessing in their voice, and that is exactly why it does not settle anything when they say it. You cannot be reassured by a promise the person making it is not in a position to keep.

So here is what I can say instead, and it is smaller and it holds weight.

The psalm does not promise David a quiet night. It promises him a keeper. Those are different offers, and only one of them was ever on the table, and it is the one that does not depend on what the night turns out to contain.

You are held by a keeper rather than by a forecast, and a keeper is the only thing that would still be true if something else happened. The written word gives the safety to God alone rather than to circumstances behaving, and His Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a woman whose shoulders have not come down since March.

You were carried through the worst of it already, and the same hands are on you this afternoon at the bottom of a slide. Psalm 4 was written by a man in unresolved trouble who lay down anyway, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from an example into something available. Here is another way to see it.