The Floor That Tilted

Eight fifty two on a Tuesday, and he is on the back stairs with a mug of coffee, the way he has been on the back stairs at that time for nine years.

Eleven steps to the landing, turn, eleven more. Brass strips on the front edge of each tread, worn to a shine on step eleven and nowhere else, because step eleven is where everybody's foot lands hardest. Wired glass in the fire door at the top. The smell of warm toner drifting out of the copy room. A curled poster about a charity run that finished two summers ago.

He comes up the second flight and reaches for the door handle, and the floor goes over.

Not a lot. Maybe ten degrees, to the left, the way a boat goes over when somebody steps onto it, and the whole building leans with it. His hand finds the rail on its own, before he has decided anything. The sound of the copier goes far away and then comes back too loud. There is heat up the back of his neck and his hands are suddenly somebody else's hands, hanging off the ends of his arms.

So he sits down on the top step. He sets the mug on the tread below and some of it goes over the brass, and he watches it run along the edge and drip, because watching it is the only job he can currently do.

The fire door opens. It is the woman from accounts. She says are you all right, and he says he dropped his phone, and she says oh, and goes through, and the door takes its time closing.

Four minutes. That is all it takes. Then it lifts off him the way weather lifts, and he stands up and picks up the mug and wipes the brass with his sleeve and walks to his desk and does the entire day, and answers forty emails, and laughs at something at lunch, and tells no one. Not his wife, not that night, not the next.

He has taken the elevator ever since. Nine days now. And this week the elevator has started to feel narrow.

That is you, at the top of stairs you have climbed every working day for nine years.

And here is the first thing, before anything else, because everything else stands on it. What happened on those stairs is not a failure of faith. It is not evidence that your trust is thin or your prayer life is weak. A body that reacts faster than thought is not a soul that has gone wrong, and nobody in heaven watched you sit down on that step and thought less of you. You said you dropped your phone because you did not have language for it yet. That is not a lie. That is a man with no words, being polite while the room came back.

The ground did not move

There is a psalm that opens in exactly the place those stairs left you, and almost nobody reads the first half of it.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

The pit in that line is not a quiet hole. The Hebrew is a pit of roaring, a pit of tumult, noise all round a man who cannot see out. And then the clay: the ground that will not hold still, that gives under the foot, that swallows the step you just took. David was not describing a mood. He was describing what it is like when the floor stops behaving like a floor.

And look at what he says the answer was. It was not that he calmed down. It was not that he mastered himself, or breathed properly, or got a grip. Someone reached down, lifted him out, and put something solid under his feet that he had not put there.

So hear it where you are. You are not standing on your own nerve, and you never were. Psalm 40 says the Rock was set under the feet by God and not found by the man, and His Spirit is the One who makes that true in a stairwell at eight fifty two on a Tuesday, whether or not you feel one thing while it happens.

Now the one plain sentence this message owes you, and then I will not go near it again. I am not going to tell you what happened on those stairs, because I do not know, and nobody writing anything from a distance can know. What I will say is this: a body that does that deserves to be looked at properly. Make the appointment, say the whole thing out loud to a doctor including the four minutes and the elevator, and take whatever you are given exactly as you are told to take it. That is not a smaller kind of faith. God is entirely inside a good doctor, and He has never once been embarrassed by one.

And whatever anybody finds or does not find, it changes nothing about the ground under this. The Rock was not put there by your steadiness, so it does not come out from under you on a day when your hands stop feeling like yours.

Look at the last phrase, too, because it is the one that speaks to the elevator. He established my goings. The word is about a step being made firm, a footing prepared under a walk. It is not about the feeling in the chest. It is about the walking. What is written promises a firm going, not a pleasant one, and His Spirit has been holding you upright on every flight of stairs you took for nine years without once thinking about it.

Now let the lonely part be named, because it is not the tilting floor. It is that you told nobody. You have carried this alone for nine days, through two dinners and a Sunday, because there is no way to say "the floor went over at the top of the stairs" without watching somebody's face change. So you said you dropped your phone, and you have been saying a version of that ever since. Hear it plainly: you are not weak for the silence and you are not a fraud for the laugh at lunch. Scripture says He is near to the brokenhearted and He saves the crushed in spirit, and His Spirit was on that top step with you, four minutes long, before anybody came through the door.