She Went Back on the Ward

The kettle has just clicked off and nobody has poured anything yet.

It is seven twelve in the morning. The staff room smells of burnt toast and instant coffee. There is a birthday card going round for somebody on nights and a plastic tub of shortbread with three pieces left in it. Handover is at half past. She has her lanyard in one hand and her phone in the other, standing at the window with her back to the room, because she opened the app without thinking about it, the way a person checks the weather.

The result is there.

Not a phone call. Not a small room with a box of tissues on the table and a chair already pulled round to face her. A line of text on a screen, in an ordinary font, sitting between a car insurance reminder and a message from her sister about Saturday.

She reads it twice. Then she puts the phone face down on the counter next to the shortbread, and she looks at the parking lot for about eleven seconds.

Somebody says her name. She says yes, coming, in a voice that comes out completely normal.

She takes the handover. She writes down four things and her handwriting is still her handwriting. She checks the controlled drugs with Marie and they both sign. She asks a man in bay three how his night was, and she means it, and when he tells her about the noise in the corridor she moves his water jug closer so he can reach it without stretching.

She does the whole drug round. She does not miss a single thing. She counts, she checks, she signs, she smiles at the woman in bed nine who calls everybody darling.

Nobody on that ward knows. Not one person. She has eleven and a half hours left of a twelve hour shift and she is going to work all of them, because there is another round at lunchtime, and at seven twelve in the morning there was nothing else available to her except the next thing on the list.

That is you.

Maybe it was not a ward. Maybe it was a classroom, a van, a checkout, a desk with somebody else's spreadsheet open on it. Maybe you took the call and then went and made the packed lunches and put the right fruit in the right box. You have been functioning in public for days, and functioning well, and that is its own particular horror, because nobody can tell.

So two things before anything else, and I want them said plainly.

What is happening to you is not a failure of faith, and it is not a verdict on you. And I am not going to explain it. There is a kind of comfort that arrives holding a reason, and it is not comfort, and I have not brought you one.

The psalm says the failing part out loud

Asaph wrote this one. He ran the music, he stood in front of everybody and led the singing, and in the same songbook he admits his feet had almost slipped and he had nearly given the whole thing up. Then he writes the line I want to put in your hand this morning. Watch the order of it, because the order is the mercy.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

He does not say his heart is fine. He does not say it held. He says it failed, out loud, in the songbook, and nobody edited it.

You are held this morning by a strength that is not the one you used to finish the drug round. That is not my encouragement to you. Psalm 73:26 puts the strength outside the person and inside God, in the very sentence that admits the failing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold real in a body that has not stopped shaking since seven twelve.

Now look at the second word he reaches for. Portion.

You have a portion, and a portion is never something a person earns at the end of a good shift. That word arrives in the written word first for the Levites, the one tribe given no field of their own, and God says to them, I am your part and your inheritance (Numbers 18:20). His Spirit is the one who takes an old word about a landless tribe and sets it down on a woman with her back to a staff room window.

You were not standing at that window on your own. Scripture says He is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18), and near is a position rather than a feeling, and the Spirit of God is called the Comforter because coming alongside is the actual work He was sent to do.

Nobody is asking you to feel it yet

Hear this from somebody who is not going to tell you off for it. The drug round was not denial. It was not pretending, it was not hypocrisy, and it was not you being cold. A body under that much load does the next competent thing, because the next competent thing is the only size available. Your hands knew what to do and your hands did it. That is not a moral failure and it is not a spiritual one.

You have not been faking anything. The written word is full of people who kept working with their insides in pieces: Asaph kept leading the singing while he set down that he had nearly slipped (Psalm 73:2), and the same Spirit who carried that psalm into the book did not tidy the wobble out of it first.

And do not let anybody tell you that you are further from Him now than you were last Tuesday, before you opened the app. You are as near to Him this morning as you were before you read it, and nearer than you feel. Paul lists everything he can think of that might separate a person from the love of God, reaches the end of the list and says nothing on it can (Romans 8:38 to 39), and the Spirit is described as living in a person rather than visiting whenever the week goes well.

You have something under you that the result did not put there and cannot take out. That is what for ever means in Psalm 73:26, and the Holy Spirit is called the deposit, the part of the inheritance already handed over in advance.