Hammering In A Room Where Nothing Is Happening

Eleven twenty on a Thursday morning, fourth chair from the end of the table. There is a jug of water with a plastic lid that nobody has touched. The projector fan is going. A man called Rob is on slide nine, which is about headcount, and slide nine is not interesting to anybody in the room including Rob.

And her heart is going at about a hundred and forty.

It started somewhere around slide six with no warning at all. Not a memory, not a thought, not anything Rob said. Her chest simply changed gear, the way an engine does, and now it is hammering hard enough that she can feel it in her back teeth. Her hands have gone cold and slightly wrong, as though they belong to somebody who is standing very close by.

So she does what she has learned to do. She keeps her face completely still. She writes a single word on her pad, which is "headcount", so that her hand has a job. She takes a sip of water because a person having a normal Thursday would take a sip of water. She looks at slide nine with the mild, patient expression of someone following along.

And here is the strangest thing about the whole business, the thing she cannot get anybody to understand at a dinner table. Nobody looks up.

The loudest event of her entire week is happening in that room, at that table, four chairs from the end, and the room is not aware of it. Someone is clicking a pen. Someone else is quietly checking their phone under the table. Rob goes to slide ten. Her whole body is screaming, and the meeting is fine.

She counts the tiles under the table, which is a thing she started doing in March. Twelve to the wall. She presses her feet down onto them and finds the floor is still there, the way she keeps needing to check that the floor is still there.

At eleven thirty-one it starts to fall away, the way the tide goes out, leaving her shaky and hot and very tired. She says one sensible thing about the headcount slide. Rob nods. The meeting ends at eleven forty and somebody makes a joke about the leftover pastries and she laughs, and then she goes and sits in a stairwell for six minutes with her hands on her knees.

That is you, in the fourth chair, with a face like a calm Thursday.

Before anything else, hear this plainly. What is happening to you is not a failure of faith. A body that goes to full alarm in a room with a water jug in it is not a soul that trusted badly, and nobody in heaven is disappointed in you at eleven twenty on a Thursday. You did not do this to yourself, and you are not doing it wrong.

The Loudest Thing In The Room, And The Room Never Knew

Start with the part that hurts most, because it is the part that gets left out.

It is not only the hammering. It is the hammering plus the pretending. It is doing the hardest thing of your whole month while arranging your face to look like a person following a slide about headcount, and then having nobody know it happened, and then going home too tired to explain why. That is two jobs at once, and the second one is invisible even to you.

And before another word: a body that does this deserves to be checked by a doctor. I am not going to tell you what your heart is or is not doing, because I am not in the room and I do not know. Nobody who is not in the room does. Go and get it looked at, properly, and if something about it is new or frightening or worse than usual, urgent care exists for exactly that reason and using it is a wise, ordinary thing to do. Doctors, medicine and good therapy are gifts. None of that is the opposite of trust, and none of it is what this message is trying to replace.

Now, having said that once, come to the verse, because a man wrote something down about his own body that he was not supposed to be allowed to say.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

Read the first half again and notice what it does not do. It does not apologize. It does not say my flesh nearly failed, or I felt as though my heart was failing, or I had a wobble and I am sorry about it. It says, flatly, in the present tense, that the flesh fails and the heart fails, and it puts that sentence in a song intended to be sung out loud in public by everyone.

Then the hinge word. But. Not instead of. Not afterwards, once the failing has been sorted out and the heart is behaving. Both halves live in one sentence, at the same time, in the same tense.

So take this now, because it is already true of you and it was written down long before Thursday: you have God as the strength of your heart at the exact moment your heart is the thing that is failing. Your body reporting alarm at eleven twenty does not cancel the second half of that verse. The second half was written for the first half. And it is not this sentence doing anything in you, it is the Holy Spirit carrying what Psalm 73:26 already settled, into a meeting room that has no idea.

Look at that last word, too. Portion. It is a table word and a land word: the share that is set aside for you, the piece of ground that has your name on it whatever else happens in the family. You have a portion that does not shrink when your hands go cold. Scripture says forever, and forever includes eleven twenty on a Thursday, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land on a person instead of just being read by them.

And the invisibility, the thing about nobody looking up. Somebody did. There is a name for God that a woman in the desert gave Him when she was completely alone and no human being knew where she was: the God who sees. You are seen right now, in the fourth chair, doing the hard thing with your face arranged. Not one second of it was unwitnessed. That is what is written, and the same Spirit who was with her by the spring is in that room with you, and He is not embarrassed by your body.