A Song In The Frozen Aisle

He is nine minutes from being done.

The list is on the back of an envelope in his shirt pocket, four things left on it. Peas. Coffee. Milk. The bread with the blue tie, not the red one, because the red one goes stale by Thursday.

Ten past nine on a Tuesday, and the store is nearly empty. One employee two aisles over is facing up cans. The cart has a wheel that pulls left and he has stopped correcting it.

He has the freezer door open and the cold is coming out over his forearms, and he is reaching for the peas.

The music has been running over the ceiling speakers all evening and he has not heard one note of it. Then four bars. A guitar figure, and a woman's voice on the second bar.

And he is not in the store.

His body goes first, the way it always does. The cold on his arms stops registering. The strip light gets a long way off, the sound in his ears goes to the sound of being under water, and his own pulse is loud and somewhere it should not be.

The song is three minutes long. He is there for all of it, door wide open, glass fogging from the inside, holding a bag of peas gone soft at one corner.

Then it ends, and something ordinary starts, and he is a man in a supermarket with his coat still on.

He puts the peas back on top of the fish, which is the wrong place. He leaves the cart by the bread, walks out past the one open register, and sits in his car with the keys in his hand and the engine off for longer than he would admit to.

And he is embarrassed. That is its own separate insult, on top of the first one.

Ten past nine on a Tuesday. One song. A whole decade came in through the ceiling.

That is you, in the car, with the engine off and the keys still in your hand.

I am not going to ask you what the song was. I am not going to ask what happened, or what year it belongs to, and I am not going to ask you to tell it or write it down anywhere on this page. You have been asked plenty.

Maybe it is not a song. Maybe it is a certain aftershave, or rain on a windshield, or a voice in a line behind you that sounds like a voice. The trigger moves. The mechanism does not: something arrives with no warning, the body goes first, and a decade you thought you had walked out of is standing in the frozen aisle with you.

And before another word: this is not a failure of faith. A body that reacts faster than thought is a body that once learned something in order to keep you alive, and tonight it did the thing it learned. That is not unbelief and it is not weak faith. Nobody in heaven is shaking their head at you for standing there with the door open.

The man who talked to his own soul

There is a man in the psalms who does exactly what you did in that car, and Scripture set him down in the middle of the book without one word of correction.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.Psalm 42:5

Three things in that sentence, and all three are for a man in a parking lot.

First, he is talking to himself, out loud, in the second person. He addresses his own soul the way you would speak to somebody riding beside you. That is not a breakdown and it is not a trick. It is in the book. So you are allowed to speak to yourself in a supermarket aisle and in a car with the engine off, and it is neither madness nor weakness. His word puts the words in your mouth, Psalm 42:5, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries them into a body that is not taking arguments yet.

Second, he asks why, and he never answers it. He asks the same question again at the end of that psalm and a third time in the next one, and no reason ever arrives. Nobody makes him produce one.

So nothing here is going to ask you what happened. You have been asked before, by people who meant well and by some who did not. You are not required to open that up tonight in order to be met by God, and anybody who says otherwise has hung a gate where He did not hang one. His word never makes His nearness conditional on a person telling it, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting outside a door He is already through.

Third, the word disquieted. Underneath it is a churning, a roaring, water in an uproar. He is not describing a mood. He is describing a body making a noise, which is what was happening at ten past nine with your hand on a freezer door. He names it, and he does not diagnose it and he does not apologize for it.

And then: I shall yet praise him. Not I am fine. Not this is nothing. Yet. He is still cast down while he says it. That is a man telling his own soul where the two of them are headed, and heading there anyway, and it is the exact opposite of cheering up.

There is one more line in that psalm and it is the one I want in your car. Deep calleth unto deep, he says, all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. And a breath later: yet the Lord will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me. A song in the night. He is under water and there is a song, and it is not the one that came over the ceiling speakers.

You were under those waves and you were not lost under them. That is His own word for it, Psalm 42:7 and 8, and His Spirit is the one who has kept a song running in you on nights when the only sound in your ears was water.

Two ordinary things belong here, and neither is a failure of trust. There are people whose whole working life is helping a body unlearn what it learned in an emergency. Sitting down with one of them is good and ordinary and no kind of detour around God.

And nobody on this page is going to tell you that peace sits behind a door you have to open first. You may have been handed forgiveness as a condition, a toll gate in front of your own rest. It is not one. Forgiveness is His work in you at His own pace, and it was never the price of tonight.