Tingling In The Pickup Line

Third car from the gate. Engine off. Seven minutes before the bell.

There is a squashed juice box in the door pocket that has been there since the trip to her sister's. There are crumbs in the seam of the passenger seat. The crossing guard in the yellow coat is standing at the curb with her sign under her arm, talking to a man with a dog, and both of them are laughing about something.

It starts in her fingers.

Not a thought. A fizz, along the outside edge of both hands, the way an arm feels when you have slept on it, except she has not slept on anything. Then her lips, or the skin just above them, going strange and slightly numb, and the inside of her mouth tasting like a coin.

Her heart picks up. Her chest gets tight and high, as if all the air has moved up into her throat and none of it is reaching the bottom of her lungs, and she is breathing quickly now and it is doing nothing at all.

Six minutes.

The car in front has its brake lights on for no reason. The mother in the next car is scrolling. Nothing outside this car has changed by one degree, and inside it her body has decided that something is happening and has begun to act on that decision without asking her.

And here is the thought that lands on top of it, which is worse than any of the symptoms.

They are about to come out of those doors.

In six minutes her children are going to come across that yard with their book bags dragging, and one of them will want to tell her about a fossil, and one of them will be furious about something that happened at lunch, and they will get into this car and look at her face.

She grips the wheel to see whether her hands still work. She checks the mirror, which is a thing she has learned to do, checking whether it shows.

Five minutes.

She is not frightened of the yard or the school or the fossil. She is frightened of her own body in front of the people she would die for, and she is sitting very still in a parked car trying to hold a wave down with the muscles of her face.

That is you, third car from the gate.

Maybe it is not a school. Maybe it is the parking lot outside work, or the four minutes before a shift starts, or the moment your key goes into your own front door. The body does the same thing wherever it does it: hands going strange, mouth going strange, air that will not go all the way down, and something inside insisting this is an emergency while everything outside carries on being an ordinary afternoon.

Hear this from me before anything else. This is not a failure of faith. A body that reacts faster than thought is not a body with a spiritual defect in it, and you are not weak, and you did not invite this. And one plain thing while we are being honest with each other: hands and lips that tingle and a chest that pounds can come from more than one cause, and it is not my place or anybody else's to tell you which one is yours. A body doing this deserves to be looked at by a doctor. Please let a doctor be the one who tells you what it is, and keep every appointment and everything you have been given. You are safe here. Now let me stand beside you for the next five minutes.

The psalm that was written during an earthquake

There is a line people quote at funerals in a calm voice, and it was not written calmly.

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

Read on two verses and you find out what kind of trouble. The earth being removed. The mountains carried into the middle of the sea. The waters roaring. It is written from inside the one disaster that takes away the thing nobody expects to lose, which is the ground. The floor itself doing what floors do not do.

That is the right psalm for a body in a wave. Because that is precisely what this is: the ground going. The one thing you never had to think about, your own steady body, has started moving under you, and no reassurance about the school yard touches it, because the school yard was never the problem.

Now look at the phrase in the middle of the verse. A very present help. The Hebrew behind those words carries the sense of a help that is easily found, richly available, right there to be had. Not a help who is on His way. Not a help you have to earn a way through to.

So hear this in the driver's seat, with your hands still fizzing. You are not waiting for God to arrive at this car. He is already nearer to you than the gate is, His word says so plainly in Psalm 46:1, and the Holy Spirit is not somewhere else while your fingers do this. He is in the car. He is closer than the wave, and He was closer than it every other time as well.

And notice what the psalm does not say, because this is where people quietly get wounded. It does not say the faithful stop feeling the earthquake. It says the ground is going and God is the refuge, both at once, in the same sentence. Feeling the shaking is not the opposite of trusting Him. The psalmist felt every bit of it and wrote the song anyway.

Then the psalm ends where you would least expect it, in the middle of all that noise. Be still, and know that I am God. Not be calm. Not perform stillness. The word is closer to letting go, taking your hands off, ceasing from the effort of holding the world together, which is exactly what you are doing with the muscles of your face right now.

You have a refuge in this car and it is not your own composure. That is His written promise rather than my encouragement, and it is His Spirit who makes it a fact in your hands and not just a sentence on a page.