Under the Feathers Until It Is Safe

The vine over the courtyard was planted by somebody who is dead now and it has grown all the way across the wire and in late afternoon the shade under it moves the way water moves.

Three of them on the cushions. The low table with the glasses on it and the tray with the burn on the edge. His friend's boy comes out, takes a biscuit without asking, is chased off, comes back.

They are laughing at something his cousin said about a car.

And he is here. That is worth saying, because it is not nothing: he is here, with the people, and he is glad about it.

But there is a year that nobody at this table knows about, and there is a version of him that went in somewhere during that year and has not come all the way out since.

He is not being dramatic about this. There is no diagnosis and no story he would tell. He is a functioning man with a good life. It is only that at some point in that year something in him quietly shut a door, and it worked, and it has kept working, and he has never opened it and he has never described that year to a living soul.

And here is what has begun to bother him. Every so often lately he feels something moving in him that feels like waking up. And instead of being glad, he braces. Because he has assumed, without ever putting it into words, that waking up means opening the door.

Habibi, stay under the vine with me a minute. Because there is a psalm about a covering, and I want you to see who is doing the covering and what it is for.

The covering is a shelter, not a fee

Psalm 91 is the psalm about protection, and everybody knows the pinions and the feathers line, and I want to read it slowly.

He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.Psalm 91:4

He shall cover thee. He does the covering. It is not something the person constructs.

Under his wings shalt thou trust. Under. The whole picture is of somebody inside something that is over them.

His truth shall be thy shield. Truth is the shield in that verse. Not the absence of truth. Not concealment. Truth is what is doing the protecting.

Now here is why that matters for a man under a vine. You have quietly assumed that the covering in you, the thing that shut in that year, is at odds with God. That it is a hiding, and that His way of dealing with hiding is to remove it.

But the psalm has Him as the coverer. He is not, in that verse, the one taking things off people. He is the one putting things over them.

You are under a covering that God Himself is described as providing, and He has never once been in the business of stripping people to prove a point. That is not a way of letting you off; Psalm 91:4 puts the covering in His hands and calls His truth the shield, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old psalm and lays it under a vine in the late afternoon with a tray on a low table. What went quiet in you is not automatically your enemy.

Now let me be very plain about the fear, because it is the only thing standing between you and this afternoon.

You have assumed that waking up means opening that year. It does not. Nowhere in the book is a person required to narrate what happened to them in order to be met by God.

Think about who He actually spoke to. He does not ask the woman at the well to explain her five husbands; He tells her He already knows and then talks about water. He does not ask Peter about the courtyard; He asks him three times whether he loves Him and then gives him a job. He does not require a report. He is not a man taking a statement.

You are not required to describe anything in order to be met, and He has never once asked for an account before He drew near. John 4:10 has Him talking about living water to a woman whose history He knew perfectly well without making her recite it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that manner of His a felt safety in a man who has never told anybody.

What coming round actually means here

Let me say what I think is available to you this afternoon, because I do not want to leave this vague.

Coming round does not mean that door opening. It means that you, the man under the vine, are here, and are able to be here, and that God is here with you, and that none of that requires the year to be touched.

The door can stay shut today. It can stay shut for a long time. It may be that it opens one day with somebody trustworthy in the room, and it may be that it never needs to, and either of those is allowed.

You have permission to leave one thing exactly where it is today, and the permission comes from the One who has the right to give it. Ecclesiastes 3:7 says there is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps the timing of that in His hands rather than handing it to anybody who wants a story out of you.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works even about things it will not describe.

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 much of yourself you can currently reach. 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.