The Wave That Is Not Your Master

The music overhead went far away, and that was the first thing.

Not the hands. The hands came about four seconds later. It was the sound: that thin, cheerful song they play in every supermarket in the world suddenly arriving from much further off, as if somebody had walked out of the room carrying the speaker. Everything else stayed where it was. The shelves, the woman comparing two jars, the boy in the trolley in front, all normal, all fine, all continuing at the usual distance. Only the sound moved.

Then the hands went. Then the floor did the thing where it is still there but you have stopped being able to feel yourself standing on it.

She left the trolley where it stood. That is the detail she keeps coming back to. Half full, in the middle of the aisle, with her list on top of the bread, and she walked out of that shop past a member of staff who said something pleasant that she did not hear, and got as far as the car and sat down sideways in the driver's seat with the door open and both feet still on the tarmac.

Twenty minutes. That is usually the shape of it. Twenty minutes of her chest going like a door in the wind and her hands cold and strange and the certainty, absolutely undented by experience, that this time it is something else.

And then it thins out. It always thins out. And what is left, sitting in a car in a parking lot with the door open, is the second thing, which is worse in a way she cannot explain to anybody: the shame.

Because she is going to have to go back in there. Because somebody has found that trolley. Because she has a phone in her hand and eleven people in it and she cannot think of one she could ring who would not need it explained. And because underneath all of that, quiet and very old, is a sentence she picked up somewhere and has never managed to put down: a person who really trusted God would not be sitting in a parking lot with the door open.

Now let me stop calling her she.

Because it is your chest. You know the exact order it happens in. And you know the twenty minutes afterwards, and the negotiation about whether you go back in, and the way you have started planning routes and exits without ever admitting to anyone that this is what you are doing.

Do not get out of the car. There is nothing you have to do in the next ten minutes and I am not going to ask you for anything.

The strength of a heart that is failing

There is a psalm by a man who nearly walked away from God entirely. He says so. He says his feet had almost slipped, and he spends most of the song being honest about it in a way that would make a lot of people uncomfortable.

And then, near the end, he says this:

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.Psalm 73, verse 26

Read where he puts God in that sentence.

Not instead of the failing. He does not say my flesh and my heart are fine now. He leaves the failing standing right there in the middle of the line, in the present tense, and then says God is the strength of the very thing that is giving out.

That is not a promise that your body will behave. It is something better and much stranger: that the strength holding you is not located in the part of you that is currently unreliable.

And notice what is not in that verse. No rebuke. No explanation of why the flesh fails. No suggestion anywhere that the failing is a moral event. The psalmist is a man whose body and heart have both let him down, saying out loud that God is his portion, and heaven does not correct him for it.

So hear it in the present tense, because that is the tense it is written in. You are His portion and He is yours while your hands are still going, not once they settle. Psalm 73 says it without a condition attached, and His Spirit is the one carrying it into an aisle you had to walk out of.

So let me take one weight off you before anything else.

What happened in that aisle is not a reading on your trust. There is no line anywhere in the Scriptures that says the person who trusts God does not have a body that reacts. Your alarm system is older and faster than the part of you that reasons, and it does not consult you before it fires, and it firing is not a message from God about your faith. Anyone who told you otherwise was wrong and you may leave that sentence in the parking lot.

Now, and I want to be exact here because you deserve exactness.

I am not going to tell you what your body was doing in that aisle. I do not know, and nobody writing anything on the internet knows, and a stranger deciding for you what your chest means is not care. If this is new, if it is different from other times, if any part of you is unsure, get it looked at by someone who can actually examine you. That is not a failure of faith and it is not a lack of trust. It is what a person does who takes their own body seriously, and God has never once been offended by somebody getting checked.

And whatever anyone finds or does not find, the verse stands unchanged. God is the strength of your heart while your heart is doing whatever it is doing.

That is the sentence I want in your hands for the next twenty minutes. Not an explanation. A location. The strength is not in the part of you that is shaking.