She Ran the Toddler Group Anyway

The key sticks in the hall door the way it always sticks, and she jiggles it twice with her hip against the wood, the way she has for four years. Inside, the smell is the same: floor polish, cold radiator, last week's coffee. She drags the blue mats out from behind the piano and lays them in the shape she lays them in every Monday, a horseshoe with a gap at the front for the parachute.

Twenty past nine. She fills the urn. She counts the juice cups and finds eleven, so she goes back to the cupboard for the twelfth, because there is always a twelfth child. She sets the shaker box on the piano stool and puts the tambourine on top of it, the good one with the red ribbons, because the ribbons are what the little ones watch.

At half past nine they come. Strollers wedged in the doorway, a toddler already running flat out for the mats, a mother apologizing for being late in the exact words she uses every week, a baby on a hip in a yellow hat. She says the welcome she always says. She finds the wipes.

Third song in, the one where everybody's hands go up and then everybody's hands go down, she is standing in the gap at the front of the horseshoe with the tambourine over her head, and the ribbons are moving, and her voice is doing all the right things.

And she is not in the room.

She is in her own kitchen at ten past nine on Sunday night, standing up because it did not occur to her to sit down, holding her phone out at arm's length like it might go off, reading the message from the hospital portal for the fourth time. The words had not changed on the third reading. They did not change on the fourth. At some point she put the phone face down on the counter and stayed standing there, and she could not say now how long that was.

Nobody in this hall knows. She has not decided to keep it from them. There simply was no moment between ten past nine on Sunday and half past nine on Monday when a person could have said it out loud, and now the parachute is coming out and eleven small children are shrieking with joy and she is down on her knees on the blue mat, gathering the edge of it into her fists.

That is you, with the tambourine over your head. Or that is you at the school gate, in the meeting, on the phone about the account, doing all the right things with your voice while some other room holds the actual you.

Before anything else, two things, and I will not move off them. This is not a failure of faith. And I am not going to explain to you why it happened, because I do not know, and neither does anybody who tells you they do.

The pavilion is not a mood

David is not writing this from the far side of anything. Read the whole psalm and you find an army camped against him and false witnesses breathing out cruelty, and not one of those things has been resolved by the time he opens his mouth to say this:

For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock.Psalm 27:5

Look hard at what that sentence refuses to say. It does not say that in the time of trouble he removes the trouble. It says in the time of trouble, right down in it, tents still up, hostilities still open, he hides me. The hiding place sits inside the hour. Not after it. Not once the results are back and the worst has been ruled out.

You are hidden right now, in that hall, with the ribbons still moving over your head. That is not my encouragement talking: Psalm 27:5 puts the pavilion inside the time of trouble rather than on the other side of it, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a written sentence into an actual roof over an actual woman on an actual Monday morning.

You have not been asked to feel hidden. Nowhere in the written word is a shelter made real by the noticing of it. A child asleep across the back seat is being carried whether or not she knows one inch of the road, and the Spirit of God is doing the carrying while your hands are full of somebody else's snack cups.

You were held through every hour of Sunday night, including the hour you cannot account for. He shall set me up upon a rock: that verb belongs to God from beginning to end, and a man being set up is a man not doing the lifting. His Spirit was in your kitchen at ten past nine while you stood there with the phone at arm's length, and He did not need you to notice Him in order to be there.

You are standing on a rock you did not climb. Scripture hands the whole action to God and leaves the psalmist nothing to boast about, so your steadiness this morning is not your achievement and your unsteadiness is not your verdict, because the same Spirit who raised Christ is the one holding you upright in a room full of toddlers.

Nobody is marking Monday morning

Somebody may have told you this week that if your faith were stronger you would be calmer by now. Hear me, daughter: that is not the gospel, that is not kindness, and it is not true. Composure has never once been the price of comfort in this book.

You are not being graded on how steady you looked at half past nine. Psalm 27 closes with wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart, which means even the courage is something He supplies rather than something you work up, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the strengthening while your hands shake.

You have something underneath you that was underneath you before that message ever arrived. That is the whole point of the psalm: His word says the rock was there first and the setting up is His work, and the Spirit does not stand around waiting for a woman to compose herself before He begins to hold.