The Door You Have To Walk Through

The stairwell smells of paint and cold metal, and she is standing on the half landing between the second floor and the third, holding the rail.

Two minutes.

Above her, through the fire door with the wired glass in it, she can hear chairs. Somebody drags one across the floor, somebody laughs, a man says something about the projector, and the sound of eleven ordinary people getting ready to sit down comes through the glass like weather.

She has the pages. She has known this material for six years. She could say it in her sleep, and last Thursday she did say it, out loud in the car, all the way to the store and back, and it was fine.

Her legs have gone.

That is the honest description. Not weak: gone, the way a chair leg goes, the soft feeling starting in the thighs and running down, her hands full of pins from the wrists out, her heart doing something high and quick that she can feel in her jaw. The breath will not go all the way in. It gets to about halfway and stops, so she takes another one on top of it, and that makes it worse.

And the thought that comes with all of it: I am about to be found out. Not for the material. For this.

She looks at the flight of stairs going down. She has looked at it four times now. There is a door at the bottom that opens onto the parking lot, and she could be in her car in ninety seconds, and she knows exactly what she would tell them, and she knows exactly how she would feel at four o'clock.

One minute forty.

She puts her forehead against the cold rail for a second, because it is cold, and that is the only reason.

That is you, on this side of the door.

Yours may be an exam room, a school office, a departure gate, a room where a family is waiting, a phone that has to be picked up in the next two minutes. But you know this staircase. You know the arithmetic of it: how the body goes long before the mind agrees, how the thing you can do easily standing at a kitchen counter becomes impossible three feet from a handle.

Hear this before anything else. What your body is doing is not a failure of faith. It is not fear you allowed in, or fear you failed to bind, or evidence of anything whatsoever about your walk with God. A body that has learned to sound an alarm at thresholds is a body doing its job badly, not a soul doing its job badly, and there is nobody on the other side of that door, and nobody above it, disappointed in you.

He Is Already On The Other Side Of That Door

There is a sentence spoken to a man standing more or less where you stand right now, and it was not given to him to calm him down. It was given to him as a fact.

And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed.Deuteronomy 31:8

Joshua is about to cross into a land he has already seen once, and what he saw the first time was walled cities and men beside whom he and ten others had felt like grasshoppers. Moses is dying. The entire weight of a nation is about to come down on him, and he is standing on the near side of a river he has to walk into.

Then the line. The LORD, He it is that doth go before thee. Not He will meet you in there. Not He will come once you get moving. He goes before, ongoing and present, already walking ahead of a man who has not taken a step.

So take that standing where you are standing. You are not walking into an empty room. He is already in it, already through the door you have not opened, and Deuteronomy 31:8 is not a pep talk, it is a report on where He is. And it is not these words steadying anything in you. It is the Holy Spirit carrying a sentence He has never once taken back into a stairwell at two minutes to the hour.

Then look at what He tells Joshua not to do: fear not, neither be dismayed. The second word is the heavier of the two. It carries the sense of something breaking, coming apart on the inside, which is a fairly exact description of a body on a half landing. God said it to a man He knew was going to feel it. He did not call it disobedience, and He did not hold the promise back until Joshua felt braver. You are not disqualified by what your chest is doing at this minute. His word lays the fact underneath the feeling instead of waiting for the feeling to improve, and His Spirit is the one who holds that fact in place while the wave goes over.

Which means the wave is not the verdict. It is loud, it is physical, it is genuinely horrible, and it is still not the thing giving orders. You have a body reacting faster than thought, and a body that is reacting is not a body in charge: 2 Timothy 1:7 says God has not given you a spirit of fear but of power and love and a sound mind, and it is His Spirit, not your steadiness, who makes a line like that true in a corridor.

And your body is not your enemy. It is not a traitor and it is not the part of you that lets the rest of you down. It is the part that has been trying to keep you alive with the only alarm it owns. You were bought whole, chest and hands and legs included, and the word calls your body a temple of the Holy Spirit rather than a liability He puts up with. His Spirit lives in the very thing you are ashamed of on that staircase.