Needing Air In A Line

The parcel is for her daughter in Ohio and it has far too much tape on it, and Corinne is aware of the tape the way you are aware of a small thing when everything larger has started to go wrong.

Six people ahead. She counted at the door, the way she counts at every door now, and six was a number she decided she could handle.

The line runs down past the greeting card rack and turns at the end of it, so that once you reach the turn you are facing back toward the door. She is not at the turn yet.

There is a fan heater somewhere behind the counter and it has been running since November.

The woman at the front is filling in customs forms for two boxes, and there is a question on the form she does not understand, and the clerk is explaining it, kindly, twice.

And then Corinne's breath stops landing.

That is the only way she has ever been able to say it. The air goes in. It goes in perfectly well. It just stops arriving anywhere. It sits high in the chest like something left on a shelf, and the bottom two thirds of her report nothing at all, so she takes another one to fix it, and that one does the same, and now she is breathing fast in a post office at eleven in the morning.

Then the heat under the collar. Then the ears going strange, a pressure, like coming down a hill too quickly.

And then the sentence, which is always the same sentence and has never once been dulled by repetition. This time it is my heart.

Now she does the arithmetic that nobody who has not done it will ever quite believe.

The door is about fourteen feet behind her. Fourteen feet of ordinary carpet tile between her and outside air.

And she cannot use it. Because to use it she would have to turn around and walk back past six people, one of whom is Verna from church, holding a padded envelope, who will say her name with a question mark on the end of it. And then Corinne would have to produce something. Something like, I just need a bit of air. And that sentence, once it exists in the world, cannot be taken back out of it. Verna will be kind about it. Verna will be so kind about it. Verna will ask her about it on Sunday, quietly, with a hand on her arm, and Corinne would honestly rather stand here and not breathe.

So she stays.

She gets to the front. She hands the parcel over. She says something about the weather and it comes out in the wrong rhythm and she hears it come out wrong. She pays. She walks the fourteen feet at an entirely normal pace, because the walking has to look normal, and gets to the truck, and sits down, and puts both hands on the wheel and does not start the engine for eleven minutes.

And what is sitting in the truck with her is not the fear. The fear has already thinned out by then. It is the other thing.

That she stood in a line and could not leave it. That a grown woman with three grandchildren cannot mail a parcel without a plan for the exit. And that the reason she could not leave was never her body at all. It was that leaving would have required an explanation.

And here is where I stop calling her she.

Because you have your own line. Maybe a checkout with your things already on the belt. Maybe a row of seats with people on both sides. Maybe a waiting room where they have already taken your name and called it once.

And before anything else, hear this. What happens in your chest is not a failure of faith. It is not a verdict on your walk with God. Nobody who loves you is disappointed in you, and a body that does this is not a soul that has let anybody down.

The burden goes over without a word

There is a psalm that gets quoted at people in your position, usually badly, and I want to show you where it actually comes from, because the address on it is not what people think.

David wrote Psalm 55 in the middle of a betrayal, and a few lines before the verse everybody knows he says something that tends to get skipped in the reading. He says fearfulness and trembling have come upon him and horror has overwhelmed him. And then he says the thing that is a gift to anybody who has ever stood in a line and wanted out: oh that I had wings like a dove, for then would I fly away, and be at rest.

Stay with that for a second, because it is remarkable that it survived. The songwriter of Israel, in the middle of worship, says out loud that he wants to be out of the room. And nobody edits it. Nobody adds a footnote explaining that a stronger man would have stayed put. God kept the sentence, in His word, and let it stand in the songbook of His people for three thousand years. You are not disqualified by wanting the door. The same Spirit who carried that psalm into Scripture is not embarrassed by a woman counting fourteen feet of carpet tile.

Then, out of that, comes the line people know:

Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.Psalm 55:22

Two words in it do all the work. Cast is not a gentle word. It is a heave. It is what you do with a sack you have carried too far when a wagon comes past going your way: you do not set it down neatly, you get it off you. And sustain is not the word for taking the load away. It is the word for propping something up so it cannot go over. He is not offering to empty the line, shorten it, or change what your chest is doing. He is offering to hold up the person.

Now here is the part that answers the actual trouble. Casting requires no explanation. There is no form to fill in. Nothing in that psalm asks you to name it, justify it, get your breathing under control first, or say one syllable that another human being could hear. You have a way to hand this over from exactly where you are standing, sixth from the front, with a parcel under your arm and Verna two places back, and not one person in that building will know it happened. It is His Spirit who carries it over, not your composure and not your volume.

And read who the promise is spoken to. He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved. Righteous there is not a report on how well you handled a post office. It is what the word says you are in Christ, given to you and never earned by you, and it does not rise and fall with your heart rate. You are righteous at your worst minute in that line exactly as much as at your best minute anywhere else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns that from a thing you know into a thing you are standing on.

So the one move you could not make in that line, you could always make. Not leaving, though leaving is allowed and we will come back to it. Handing it over. In silence. Standing still. While the fan heater runs and the clerk explains the customs form for the second time.