You Can Put Your Hands Down

In the next room they are laughing at something on the television, the loud helpless kind of laughing where somebody has to explain it afterwards and it is not funny the second time.

Yvonne is at the sink with the last two mugs. Nothing is wrong. That is the thing about tonight. The oven is off, the bins are out, there is a birthday card on the windowsill waiting for a stamp, and eleven weeks have gone by since the conversation that took the floor out from under this house.

She catches sight of herself in the black of the window and sees that her shoulders are up around her ears.

They have been like that for a while. She sets the mug down and tries to drop them on purpose and they come halfway and stop. Her hands are wrapped round the edge of the worktop, and she has no memory of putting them there, and she is listening to a perfectly happy room through a wall as if it were a corridor she has to get everybody out of.

You are standing like that too.

Not for the same reason and not for the same eleven weeks, but you know exactly what I am describing, and you have caught yourself at it in a window or a car mirror or the back of a spoon. The worst of it has passed. And what nobody warned you about is that passing is not the same as finishing, and that a body which has been hit once will stand ready for the second one long after the room has gone quiet.

The bracing is not unbelief

Let me get one thing off you before anything else, because you may well have put it there yourself.

The standing ready is not a failure of faith. It is not a sign that you never really trusted Him, and it is not something to repent of at the sink at ten past nine. It is what a body does after impact. It is memory living in the muscles, and it is doing what it thinks is its job, which is making sure you are never taken by surprise like that again.

You are not being judged for how your shoulders are sitting tonight. Scripture says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is the single most tender sentence in the psalms about human weakness, and the Holy Spirit who lives in you is not standing behind you with a clipboard about your nervous system.

And while I am here: if the bracing has not let go at all, if the nights are bad and have been for a long time, then telling your doctor about it is a sensible and unremarkable thing to do, and nothing about doing it says anything at all about your faith. If it has gone further than that, if there are hours when being here at all is too much, tell one living person today, or call a crisis line: 988 in the United States, or the emergency number where you are. Doctors and crisis lines are good gifts and reaching for one is never a failure of anything.

An anchor was never a forecast

Now to the thing I actually want to put in your hands.

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain.Hebrews 6:19

Think about who gets given an anchor. Nobody puts one on a boat that is never going to meet weather. An anchor is standard equipment for a vessel that expects to be somewhere exposed, at night, with the wind getting up. Its whole purpose assumes rough water. It is not a promise that the sea goes flat.

So I will not tell you nothing else is coming. I do not know, and anybody who tells you they do is guessing at your expense. What the verse says is not that the weather stops. It says the line is fastened somewhere that does not move.

You are equipped for weather rather than promised its absence, and that is a far kinder thing to have been given. Hebrews 6:19 hands over an anchor and never once mentions a forecast, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person hold the difference without hearing it as bad news.

You are anchored right now, in the middle of a week that is not finished. That is written, and the writer of Hebrews put it in the present tense on purpose, and it is His Spirit who makes it hold in a kitchen rather than the wording of it doing anything by itself.

Where the line is fastened

Read where the anchor goes. Not down into the seabed, which is the picture everybody has. Up, and in: into the inner place behind the curtain, which was the one room in the whole of Israel's worship that nobody could walk into.

And the next line says who went in there. Jesus, as a forerunner, on our behalf.

That is the load path, and I have spent enough time round buildings to care about load paths. The weight of you is not resting on your grip, your composure, your ability to hold it together in front of your family, or the strength of your faith on a Tuesday. It runs up the line to a place that has never moved and cannot be got at.

You have been fastened to the one fixed point there is, and the fastening was done by Christ and not by you. The word says He went in as forerunner for us, and the Holy Spirit is the guarantee of it, and nothing about that arrangement was ever load-bearing on your steadiness.

You were held through every one of those eleven weeks by a line you were not holding, and Hebrews 6:19 calls it sure and steadfast rather than dependent, and the Holy Spirit is the guarantee that the fastening is real and not a figure of speech.

I am not going to tell you why any of this happened to you, either. I do not know, and I am not going to hand you a reason dressed up as comfort.