The Room You Are Actually In

It was a sweater on a rail in a charity shop, and it smelled of somebody's washing powder.

That is all. A Tuesday afternoon, half past two, nothing happening. She was in there for a birthday card and she stopped by the rail the way you do, and put her hand out to move a sleeve along, and the smell came up out of the wool.

And her body left the shop.

Her body was somewhere else entirely, and it was not two thirty on a Tuesday, and her heart was going like she had run up three flights, and her hands had gone cold and slightly wrong, and there was a sound in her ears that was not the radio behind the till.

It lasted perhaps twenty seconds. Nobody noticed. The woman at the counter was talking to somebody about a raffle. A bus went past outside. She stood there holding a cardigan sleeve with her whole system on full alert for something that finished years ago, and then it drained away and left her shaky and embarrassed and, worst of all, annoyed with herself.

She bought the card. She walked home. And the rest of the day had a gray rind on it that she could not get off.

That evening she sat in her own armchair with a cup of tea going cold on the arm, and did the thing she always does, which is a kind of quiet arithmetic. It was years ago. Everyone else has moved on. I am fine, actually, most of the time. So why does my body keep doing this.

I want to say something to her, and to you, before another minute of that arithmetic goes by.

Your body is not being disobedient. It is not a spiritual failure and it is not a lack of trust and it is not a sign that you never really let it go. Something happened, and your body did exactly what a body is built to do, which is learn the shape of danger fast and hold on to it hard, because that is how it kept you. It is not attacking you. It is still, all these years later, trying to look after you, and it has simply not been told the shift is over.

I am not going to ask you what it was. Not one question about it, not now, not later in this message. It is yours and it stays yours, and nothing here needs it in order to work.

Where the help actually is

There is a line I want to put in your hands, and I want to slow it right down, because the ordinary reading of it goes past the part that matters.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.Psalm 46:1

Very present.

Not very powerful, though He is. Not very willing, though He is. Present. The word is doing something about location and about time at once, and both of them are exactly where your trouble lives.

Because here is the strange geography of what happens to you at half past two by a rail of second hand clothes. The alarm is old. The danger is old. Everything about that twenty seconds belongs to another year. But the fear is not happening back then, it is happening in a charity shop, now, in your chest, with a bus going past outside. And that is where God is. Not filed away in the past with the thing itself. Here, in the shop, in the aisle, at two thirty, with His hand under your elbow while your heart is going.

A refuge is not a memory and it is not a plan. It is a place you are in. The verse does not say God gives you refuge if you can get yourself somewhere calmer first. It says He is the refuge, which means the walls are wherever He is, and He is here.

And that is not a kind thought of mine about your afternoon. It is Psalm 46 as it is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a written line down a charity shop aisle and puts it under your elbow.

And I want to say the next part very plainly, because somebody may have said the opposite to you at some point.

Peace is not being held behind a gate marked forgiveness. Nobody has to complete anything, settle anything, or produce any particular feeling about any particular person before God is a refuge to them. He is very present help in trouble. Not very present help in trouble once certain conditions are met. If forgiveness comes, it will come the way morning comes, in His own way, and it will not be the toll you paid to be allowed peace this evening. Psalm 46 sets no gate in front of the refuge, and His Spirit did not bring you this far in order to hold the door.

Nor was any of this your fault. Whatever you have been told, and whatever you have quietly told yourself in the small hours, the shadow of a thing is not evidence about the person standing in it.

One more thing, and I mean it warmly. Nowhere in the written word is a counselor set against the Spirit of God, and His Spirit has never yet needed you to go without help in order to work. If you have someone good to talk to about this, a therapist, a counselor, a doctor, that is not a lesser road and it is not a failure of trust. God has put people in the world who know how to sit with this, and going to them is one of the ways He helps. And if it ever gets darker than the gray rind on an afternoon, if you find yourself somewhere frightening, tell a real person tonight. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line or emergency number, and one human being who will stay with you. You are worth that call being made.