Nine Days Out and Already Dreading It

Twenty to twelve at night, and the kitchen is dark except for the lamp over the cooker, and she is standing at the fridge with a glass of water she did not really want.

The itinerary is under the fruit bowl. It has been under the fruit bowl since the second week of July, printed off the same evening it was booked, and she has taken it out and read it more times than she has admitted to anyone. She knows the aircraft type. She knows the flight is two hours and fifty minutes and she knows what the weather does over that stretch of water in September. She has looked all of it up, repeatedly, because looking it up feels for about four minutes like doing something.

On the fridge there is a calendar and she has stopped drawing on it, because at some point crossing the days off turned into counting the days down, and those are two entirely different activities.

Nine squares left.

The strange part, the part she cannot explain to her sister, is that the flight is not the worst of it. The flight is two hours and fifty minutes. The dread has already had a month. It got into the shopping, and the Sunday afternoons, and her daughter's school concert, where she sat through the whole second half doing arithmetic about how many days were left. It gets into the hour before sleep every single night, and by now her body has learned that going up the stairs to bed is when the film starts.

She has prayed about it. Of course she has prayed about it. She has prayed the sensible prayer and the desperate prayer and the one at two in the morning that was mostly just breathing, and the dread came back in the morning like a dog that knows the house, and somewhere along the way she quietly picked up a second fear on top of the first one, which is that a woman who really trusted God would not be standing at her own fridge at twenty to twelve counting squares.

I want to stop describing her now, because I think the calendar is yours. Maybe it is not a flight. Maybe it is a scan, or a hearing, or a conversation you have already had nine hundred times with someone who is not in the room.

Whatever the date is, here is the true shape of it. The thing itself is coming once. You have been paying for it every day for a month.

Your body is not accusing you of anything

Let me take the second fear off you first, because it is the heavier one and it is not even yours.

The dread is not a verdict on your faith. It is not evidence about your relationship with God. It is not the Holy Spirit warning you, and it is not a crack in your trust that everybody else can see. It is a body doing exactly the job it was built to do, with old information, at full volume.

Your nervous system was made to get you through danger, and it is very good at it, and it does not know the difference between a September flight and a bear. It has one setting for something big and uncontrollable that is coming, and that setting is on, and it has been on since the middle of July because you handed it a date and it has been guarding the date ever since. That is not sin. That is a smoke alarm doing its work while somebody makes toast.

So we are not going to spend one more minute on the question of whether you should be feeling this. You are feeling it. That is the ground we are standing on. His Spirit did not arrive in your kitchen tonight to grade the way your chest is behaving. The word never once asked you to feel differently before God would come near.

Now the real question, which is a much better one. Where is God in the nine days.

Not on the aircraft. We will get to the aircraft. In the nine days. In the ordinary evenings between now and then, the ones the dread has been eating.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:9 and 10

Look at what David actually does there. He is not arguing that the far place is safe. He is not talking himself into it, and he is not pretending the sea is small. He goes to the edge of what he can imagine, the furthest coast, the wings of the morning, and he finds that the hand of God is already standing there.

That is the thing about the God we have. He does not meet you at the gate. He is not waiting for you at the destination like a man with your name on a card. He is already in the nine days. He is in the Wednesday you have written off, and the Sunday you are dreading in advance, and the twenty past eleven tonight, and He is at thirty three thousand feet over that water at the exact hour you have been rehearsing, and He is not arriving. He is there. Psalm 139:10 does not say His hand will meet you out there. It says the hand leads and the hand holds, present tense, both of them, already.

You have been treating those nine days as a waiting room. They are not a waiting room. They are nine days of your one life, and He is in every one of them, and He is not asking you to enjoy them or to feel differently about the tenth. The Holy Spirit is the reason that reads as company and not as a nice idea about company.