The Smell Of That Corridor

Six forty on a Tuesday, and he is standing in the corridor outside the changing rooms with a rolled towel under his arm.

His daughter is nine. Lesson four of ten. She went ahead through the double doors with her cap already on, and he told her he would be right behind her.

The corridor is pale green tiles to shoulder height. A mop bucket is parked against the fire door with a yellow folding sign beside it. Somebody has just cleaned the floor.

It is the smell. Floor cleaner over warm damp, something antiseptic underneath it, and he is not in the leisure center anymore.

He is on the fourth floor of a hospital, eleven years ago, at twenty past three in the morning, with a plastic cup of coffee going cold in his hand.

He does not see pictures. That is not what happens, and he gave up trying to explain it to anybody years ago. What happens is that the whole of that week is in his chest at once, in under a second, entire, the way a room is entire the moment the light goes on.

His hand finds the rail. There is a whistle from the pool, a splash, a child shrieking with laughter about eleven feet away, and none of it reaches him. A woman with a baby carrier says sorry as she edges past. He says no problem, and his voice comes out fine.

It takes about four minutes to let go.

Then he pushes through the double doors, climbs to the third row of the bleachers, and watches his daughter kick to the far end and back. He claps when she looks up. His shirt is stuck to his back.

Nobody in that building knows. His wife does not know it happens at the pool. He has told himself for years that it is ridiculous, because it was eleven years ago, and he is fine, and he has a job and a mortgage and a daughter who is good at backstroke.

Now step out of his corridor and stand in your own.

Because you know the smell. Maybe it is not floor cleaner. Maybe it is diesel, or a particular washing powder, or the first genuinely cold morning in October, or a ringtone nobody uses anymore. It arrives, and the whole thing arrives with it, and it is faster than you and it always has been.

Two things before anything else, and I mean both of them.

The first: this is not a failure of faith. Your body is not disobeying you and it is not lying to you. It is doing the exact thing it was built to do, at a speed thought cannot reach, and eleven years is not a report card.

The second: I am not going to ask you what happened. Not here, not further down, not once. You do not have to go back into that week to read this, and nothing in this message needs the details in order to work.

The verse that is not telling you to get over it

Isaiah 43 is God speaking over a people with exile ahead of them, and in the middle of it He says something that has been misread at bedsides for centuries.

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.Isaiah 43:18-19

Read who is being told, and about what. The former things here are the exodus: the sea opening, the pillar of fire, the rescue this people had been commanded to remember in book after book. God is not reversing Himself and He is not asking anybody to develop amnesia. He is saying the old landmark is about to be too small to steer by, because a bigger rescue is on the way.

So verse 18 was never handed to a body that flinches at a smell. It is not an order to stop remembering and it is not a test you have been failing at six forty on a Tuesday. You have read it as a rebuke, quietly, for a long time. It is not a rebuke. Isaiah 43:18 is God turning a nation's eyes forward, and the Holy Spirit did not bring you to this verse tonight to tell you off.

Now count the verbs in the next line. I will do a new thing. I will even make a way. Every verb in the promise belongs to God, and there is not one imperative laid on anybody's memory anywhere in it. The single thing asked of the hearer is to notice: shall ye not know it? You are not the one doing the making. His word never put that on you, and His Spirit is the One at work in the doing.

And look at where the road runs. He makes a way in the wilderness. Not around it and not instead of it. He does not say the wilderness gets deleted. He says a road appears inside it, which means the corridor stays in the world and stops being the end of the line. That is written in Isaiah 43:19, and the same Spirit who breathed it is the One walking you down it.

Now it shall spring forth. Now. Not once you have stopped reacting, not after you have earned a steadier nervous system. The springing is present tense in His word, and it is happening in a man on the third row of the bleachers with his shirt stuck to his back. The Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to be calm before He begins.

And the way He makes runs through ordinary things. A doctor is a way. A good therapist is a way. Somebody trained in what a body does with a shock is a way, and there is nothing anywhere in Isaiah 43 that makes walking down one of those a smaller kind of faith. He made the road. He never said it had to look supernatural to be His.