Six Times a Day He Checks the Balance

Twenty to seven in the morning, kettle on, and before the kettle has even started making a noise his thumb has done it.

Face down on the counter, face up, two taps, the little wait, the number.

The same number. Obviously the same number. It was the same number at half past nine last night and nothing has moved in the eight hours since, because nothing moves at that hour, and he knows this the way he knows his own name.

Twenty past nine, in the truck at the lights. Same.

Ten to twelve, standing outside with a sandwich. Same.

Two o'clock. Half past four, sitting in the parking lot before he goes in, engine off, three minutes with the phone in both hands like a man reading a letter. Twenty to ten at night, in bed, brightness turned right down so it does not wake her, elbow tucked in, the light of it on the ceiling anyway.

Six times. Some days more. Nothing has changed and nothing is going to change before Friday.

He knows exactly how absurd it is. He has said so out loud, to his own face, in the bathroom mirror, and then gone downstairs and done it again in the hall.

Because it is not really about the number.

Nine months ago the number changed while he was looking at it. That is the whole thing, and everything since has come out of that one afternoon. Something in him got wired that day, and now his thumb goes before he has decided anything, the way your foot goes for a brake pedal in a car you are not driving.

And it is not just the phone. He stands differently when a phone rings in the house. He reads his wife's face when she comes off a call, for about a second and a half, before he can stop himself. He does not really enjoy Sunday any more, because Sunday is the day before Monday.

The worst of it has passed. That is the strange part. People say so, and they are right, and he can see they are right.

He is still braced.

That is you, and it does not have to be a balance.

Yours might be the symptom you check for with two fingers, in the same spot, four times a day. It might be the tracking page you refresh. It might be the light under a bedroom door at one in the morning. It might be the way you read a text message three times looking for the tone, or the way you already know what it means when somebody says "have you got a minute".

Two things, and I mean them both. Nobody here is going to call the bracing a failure of faith, because it is not one; it is a body that learned something in one afternoon and is being loyal to what it learned. And nobody here is going to tell you it is over, because I do not know that, and it is not mine to announce about your life.

A mountain does not brace

Here is the verse under this message, and it is one line long, and the picture in it is doing everything.

They that trust in the LORD shall be as mount Zion, which cannot be removed, but abideth for ever.Psalm 125:1

Look at what it does not say. It does not say they shall have no further trouble. It does not say the weather stops. It does not say a man who trusts God gets a life with no second afternoon in it.

It says he is like a mountain that cannot be removed.

And read the very next line of that psalm, because it changes the picture again. It says the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the city in the picture is not standing out on a plain by itself. It is surrounded. The psalm's whole idea of safety is a place with hills all around it, which is a picture of being enclosed rather than a picture of being untouched.

You are held by something that is not your own alertness, and it was holding at twenty to ten last night while your thumb was moving. Psalm 125:1 puts the immovability in the mountain rather than in the vigilance of the people living on it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in a man rather than the number of times he checks. A mountain does not brace. It does not stand there tensed. It is not steady because it is trying to be.

The flinch is not a verdict on you

Now let me say the thing I most want you to have, and I want to say it slowly, because you've been quietly ashamed of this for months.

The flinch got installed. It was not chosen, and it is not a sin, and it is not unbelief wearing a disguise. Ask anybody who has been in a bad enough afternoon and they will tell you their body kept the receipt.

You were not downgraded by God on the day your thumb started doing that. Scripture calls the trusting man immovable in the same breath as it puts hills all around him, which is not the language of a man who has nothing to be surrounded by, and the Spirit of God is described as helping in our weakness, a phrase that assumes the weakness is still in the room. Nothing in that verse asks the man to feel like a mountain first.

And I am not going to tell you that there is no second blow coming. I do not know. Nobody honest does, and a man who has already had one afternoon can smell that kind of reassurance from the other side of a room, and it does him no good at all.

What is on offer is better than a guarantee about Friday. It is that whatever Friday holds, it arrives to a man who is already held.

You have an anchor that was not put there by you and cannot be pulled up by news. What is written says the one who trusts is as Mount Zion, which cannot be removed, and the verb there is passive: something is being done to the mountain, or rather not being done to it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the seal and the deposit on a person, language for something already fastened and not up for review.