A Hiding Place That Is a Person

The blanket over the arm of the sofa is the good one and everybody knows not to take the good one, and somebody always takes the good one.

Friday. Popcorn in the yellow bowl. Three of them, feet up, the lamp on low and the big light off because that is the rule.

And they have chosen a film, and she has said yes to it, and she said yes to it because she checked it first. Quietly, on her phone, about forty minutes ago, in the kitchen while the kettle went.

She checks everything. She has for years. There are films she does not watch, songs she skips, one street she does not drive down, a supermarket she goes to further away. It is a whole architecture and she built it herself and nobody has ever noticed because she is extremely good at it.

She would tell you it works. And it does.

What is happening lately is that something in her is coming awake, in a good way, in a way she wants. And immediately behind that comes a fear so specific she can almost hear it: if I wake up all the way, all of this comes down, and I will be standing in the middle of my life with nothing arranged.

Come and sit on the end of the sofa with me. Because there is one line in a psalm that I think changes what your arrangements even are.

The hiding place has a name

David is writing about being forgiven and being kept, and he says this.

Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.Psalm 32:7

Thou art my hiding place.

Not you give me one. Not you show me where one is. You are one.

That is not a small grammatical detail, it is the whole thing. The shelter in that verse is not a structure. It is a Person, and a Person can go with you, and a Person can be in a room you have not planned for, and a Person does not have to be maintained.

Now hold that beside your architecture. Everything you have built is a structure. Structures work, and yours does, and they have one weakness that you have been aware of for years without saying it, which is that a structure only covers the situations you thought of in advance.

You have a shelter that is a Person rather than a structure, and a Person does not have to be built ahead of time. That is not a spiritual reframe offered to a careful woman; Psalm 32:7 says Thou art my hiding place and puts the shelter in the second person, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm about being kept and lays it on a sofa on a Friday with the big light off. What you have been maintaining alone has never been the only thing over you.

Now the fear, and it deserves to be answered exactly as you phrased it.

You said: if I wake up all the way, all of this comes down. Notice that this assumes the waking and the dismantling are the same event, and that God is the one doing the dismantling.

Nowhere is that His method. He does not, anywhere in the book, remove somebody's protection as a first move. He adds Himself. The Israelites in the wilderness kept the cloud and the fire and He fed them daily while they were still exactly the frightened people who had come out of Egypt.

You are not going to be stripped as part of being woken, and He has never once removed a covering before He was the covering. Psalm 91:1 says he that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that shadow an actual location rather than a way of speaking, which is what a person needs before anything else is moved.

Your arrangements are not sins

Let me be plain, because you have been carrying a low grade shame about the checking and it is not warranted.

Avoiding a street is not a sin. Skipping a song is not a sin. Checking a film before you agree to it is not a lack of faith, and anybody who tells you it is has not sat where you have sat.

Those are the reasonable acts of a person who knows what will happen if they are caught off guard, and who has decided, sensibly, to reduce the number of times that occurs.

What may change, over time and gently, is how many of them you need. That is His work and it is not on a timetable and it is not the price of admission to anything.

You are not being asked to dismantle anything to qualify, and He has never made a person's protections into the fee. Isaiah 40:11 says He shall gently lead those that are with young, and gently is the operative word, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that pace regardless of what anybody else thinks the pace should be.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works from behind any arrangement you like.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how exposed you are willing to be. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.