The One Who Held You While You Slept

The mug is a green one with a chip out of the rim that everybody in the house knows about and nobody throws away.

She is washing it. Water running, cloth going round the inside, and she sets it on the rack and reaches for the next thing and finds that the next thing is the green mug, because it is already on the rack, because she has already washed it, and she can now recall having washed it at least once before that.

She turns the tap off and stands there with her hands in the water.

Outside the window over the sink the light is coming up over the yard the way it does, gray and then gold along the top of the fence, and the dog is walking the line of it like he does every morning of his life. There is nothing wrong out there. There is nothing wrong in here either. The bread is proving under a cloth, the bill on the sill is paid, the girls are grown and both of them called this week.

It is only that she cannot say when she was last actually inside any of it.

And then the thought arrives, quiet as the water, and it is not a thought about mugs. It is this. If I have been like this for as long as I think I have, He let go of me somewhere.

That is the sentence. Not the flatness, which she has learned to work around. The sentence underneath it, which she has never said out loud to a living soul, and which she is now saying to a sink at ten past six in the morning.

If you know that sentence, stay with me. I am not going to argue with you about how you feel, because feelings are not a court and I am not going to try you in one. I want to show you a line David wrote about exactly this, and I want you to see what he noticed when he woke up.

What David noticed the moment his eyes opened

He was not in a good stretch. He was on the run from his own son, out of the city, up the hill with his head covered, and thousands of people were saying out loud that God was finished with him. He writes it down. He does not soften it.

Then he writes this.

I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me.Psalm 3:5

Read the order of it, because the order is the whole thing. He lay down. He slept. He woke up. And the reason he gives for waking up is not that he set an alarm or that the danger passed. The reason he gives is that the Lord sustained him. He is reasoning backward from the fact of the morning to the faithfulness of God, and he is doing it in the middle of the worst week of his life.

Here is what that means for a woman at a sink. You are awake. That is not in dispute; you are here, reading, thinking about a green mug. And by David's own logic, the waking is evidence, and what it is evidence of is not your alertness.

You are awake this morning and the sustaining that got you here was not yours to do. That is not a comfort I invented on the way past; Psalm 3:5 argues from the waking back to the One who held him, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a hillside psalm and lays it across a farm kitchen with the tap still dripping. The stretch you cannot account for was not a stretch He was absent from. It was a stretch He was holding.

Now let me say the plainer thing, because the fear underneath your sentence deserves a plain answer and not a poem.

He did not let go. I know that is the exact thing you would expect me to say, so let me tell you why I can say it without flattering you. It is because letting go is not something Scripture ever puts in His hands. It puts falling in ours, constantly, and it puts holding in His, constantly, and the two are never swapped over. He that keepeth thee will not slumber (Psalm 121:3). Not will not slumber while you are attentive. Will not slumber.

You have been held through every hour you cannot remember, and He was not asleep in any of them. The written word says plainly that He who keeps you does not slumber, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a fact in a body rather than a nice line about God. There is no gap in the record. There is only a gap in what you were able to feel, and those are not the same thing and never have been.

Where the fear actually comes from, and what to do with it

Here is a thing worth knowing about numbness, said carefully, because I am not going to diagnose you and I am not able to.

Something in a person can go quiet so that the rest of them keeps working. It is not a decision anybody makes in a morning. It happens the way a callus happens, gradually, over something that needed covering, and it does its job so well that after long enough it stops feeling like a covering and starts feeling like your character.

That is a description, not an accusation. There is nothing in it you have to confess and nothing in it you owe anybody an account of. And it does not follow, at any point, that God stepped back when the feeling did. That is a conclusion your quiet drew for you while you were not looking, and it is not in the text.

You have not been outside anything, and the numbness never once put you there. Romans 8:38 says that neither death nor life nor things present nor things to come can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and it is His Spirit who takes a list that long and makes it land on the one item you were most afraid was missing from it. Feeling is not on the list of things that can separate you. Nothing is.

And you have a mouth, which turns out to be the whole point of the next part.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough. Notice how small the requirement is. Not the strength of what you feel this morning. Not the quality of your attention. Just that a person opens their mouth and says what God has already said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way it works. The switch is in your hand. The current is His.