The Box From the Office Is Still Taped

He went out to the garage for a socket wrench, which is a fifteen second job, and he has now been standing in the same spot for four minutes.

The box is on the shelf above the workbench, where he put it in February. It is a copy paper box with the lid tucked under, and there is packing tape across the seam that he put on in the parking lot that afternoon with his hands shaking, wrapped around twice and then a third time, which was more tape than the job needed.

The tape has gone slightly yellow at the edges. That is the thing that got him this afternoon. Four months is long enough for tape to change color.

He knows exactly what is in there. A monitor stand. A stapler that was actually his and that he took on principle. A mug. A picture frame that he laid face down on top of everything else before he closed it, and he remembers doing that, and he remembers thinking at the time that laying it face down was a strange thing to do.

He has not opened it. He has moved it twice, once to get at the Christmas boxes and once when he reorganized that whole shelf, and both times he moved it without opening it and put it back with the tape intact.

Outside, the garage door is rolled up and it is that hour when the light comes in low across the floor and lights up all the dust. Somebody's kids are out on the street. A lawn mower is going two houses down.

And he is fine. That is the strange part. It settled. He is working. The money is not the emergency it was in March, and the thing that happened is, in every practical sense, finished and behind him.

But his phone buzzed in his pocket about a minute ago and his whole body checked it before he took a breath. That is what happens now. Every time. Four months of every time.

His shoulders have not come down since February and he does not know how to put them down. He is not afraid of anything specific. He is just braced.

You know this garage. Maybe your box is a folder you have not opened, or a room in the house you go around instead of through, or a number in your phone you have not deleted and will not call. Maybe there is no box at all and it is only your body: the flinch when the phone goes, the way you read the first line of an email standing up, the sleep that stops at four. The worst of it has passed and you are still standing in the doorway with your weight on the back foot, waiting.

Hear me first, and hear this one carefully. The bracing is not a failure of faith. It is not ingratitude and it is not a sign that you did not trust God through the winter. A body that took a hit learns something, and what it learned was how to watch the door, and that is not a spiritual defect.

And I am not going to tell you it is over. I do not know that. Nobody who has said it to you knows it either, and you have noticed that they say it in a slightly too bright voice.

Come stand in the light with me for a minute. The dust is doing that thing.

Established is a walking word

The line I want up on that shelf with the box is one that people quote at half length, and the half they leave off is the half you need.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

Everybody stops at the rock. Feet on a rock, out of the mud, that is the part that ends up on things.

Look at the last three words. Established my goings. Goings. Not arrivals, not destination, not a final position. Goings is walking. It is a man's ordinary daily moving about, and the word under established means made firm, made steady, given a footing under it.

You have a footing that was put under your walking rather than under your finish line, and it is under you in that garage this afternoon. That is not my read of your four months: Psalm 40:2 credits both the rock and the steadying to Him and never once to the state of the man's nerves, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a firm thing actually firm under a person rather than just true on a page.

And here is what I am not going to do with that verse. I am not going to tell you the pit is behind you and therefore you should feel differently by now.

You are not being graded on how quickly your body catches up with your circumstances, and you were never asked to produce calm as evidence of anything. What is written puts the lifting, the setting and the establishing all in His hands, three verbs and He is the subject of every one of them, and the Spirit of God is called the helper because helping is the job, not supervising.

The same psalm says both

Now stay with this psalm a minute, because there is something in it that almost nobody mentions and it is the reason I chose it for you.

The man who wrote the line about the rock is not finished with his trouble. Read down. Later in the very same psalm he says innumerable evils have compassed him about, that his own heart fails him, and he asks God, please, come and get me out.

Same psalm. Same man. After the rock.

Nobody edited that out. Nobody made him choose between his testimony and his ongoing situation, and nobody put a note in the margin telling him that having said the first thing he had forfeited the right to say the second.

You are allowed to be standing on a rock and still braced, and you were never required to pick one of those and pretend the other one was not happening. Psalm 40:2 and Psalm 40:12 sit in one poem with nothing crossed out between them, and it is His Spirit who holds a man steady enough to carry both at once without either one being a lie.

That is the whole difference between what I am asking you to put down and what I am not.

I am not asking you to put down your awareness that hard things happen. That would be foolish and God is not asking it either. What I am talking about is the standing watch. The unpaid night shift you have been working in your own body since February, as though your shoulders being up were part of what is keeping the house standing.

You have not been the one holding this together, and you were not the thing that kept the roof on during the worst of it either. Scripture gives the establishing to Him in that verse, in the past tense, as something already done rather than something being maintained, and the same Spirit who did it in February is in the garage at four in the afternoon.