Refreshing It Will Not Make You Safe

The tea went cold at about twenty to twelve. It is ten past one now, and he is still standing at the kitchen counter in the dark, in a t-shirt, with his bare feet on tile that has been cold for an hour, and the only light in the whole house is coming up off the phone into his face.

He came down for a glass of water. That was the plan. He has a very clear memory of forming that plan.

He has read the same headline four times from four different places. He has read the update under the headline. He has read the part of the update that has not changed since eleven. He has gone into the comments, which he swore off in February. He has checked the second country, the one that has nothing to do with him, the one he could not have found on a map two years ago and can now name three officials from. He has gone back to the first page to see if anything came in while he was gone.

Nothing came in. Something always comes in.

Upstairs the boiler knocks once, the way it does. He does not move. His thumb comes down and drags the screen and lets it spring back, and the little wheel turns, and the same words come back up again in the same order.

Here is the thing he could not tell you if you woke him up and asked him: he is not looking for information. He has enough information. He could brief a room.

He is looking for one sentence. He has never seen it written anywhere, not once, but he would know it instantly if it appeared, and it goes something like: it is fine, it is over, you and yours are not in this, you can go to bed.

And this is where I stop talking about him, because you know that sentence too. You have been looking for it for a long time.

You do not think of it as fear. You think of it as being responsible. Being informed. Being the one in this family who is paying attention, because somebody has to, because the last time something happened you found out late and you have never quite forgiven yourself for the hours you spent not knowing. So you keep the watch. You check before you sleep. You check when you wake at three and again at six before your feet touch the floor. You check in the car park before you go in.

And every single time, you are hoping for the same sentence, and every single time you close the phone with your chest a little tighter than when you opened it, and you get into bed beside someone who is already asleep, and you lie there in the dark being the only person in the house who is on duty.

You are not looking for news, you are looking for a covering

Let me clear one thing out of the road first, and I want to do it before anything else, because somebody has already said it to you and it was cruel even if they were smiling when they said it. Whatever it was, it did not come out of Scripture and it did not come from the Spirit, and I am not leaving it lying in the road.

Your fear is not a failure of trust.

Hear me. It is not evidence of anything missing in you. A body that startles at the door is a body doing precisely the job it was built to do. It is a good system running on old information, information it was handed by something that actually happened, and nobody ever came and told it that the thing was over. That is not unbelief. That is a faithful alarm nobody switched off.

So we are not going to spend one minute of this treating your nervous system as a spiritual problem.

But I do want to name what the checking is, because you have never quite said it plainly and it deserves to be said plainly. Every refresh is a small prayer. It is a request for a guarantee. You are asking the screen for the one thing a screen has never in the history of the world been able to give anybody, which is certainty about tomorrow morning, and the screen has an infinite supply of nearly and has run out of yes.

And it costs. It costs your sleep, and it costs your evenings, and it costs the people in the room with you, who can tell when you are only partly there. It has quietly rearranged what you believe about the world, because a feed is not the world, a feed is the sharpened edge of the world served without the ordinary hours in between, and you have been drinking it neat since February. None of that is a character flaw. It is what happens when a covering is looked for in the one place Scripture never put it, and the Spirit has been standing at that counter with you on every one of those nights while you looked.

Now listen to how the ninety first Psalm speaks about a night like yours. It does not say fear is silly. It does not tell the frightened man to be reasonable. It names the hour.

You will not be afraid of the terror of the night, nor of the arrow that flies by day.Psalm 91:5

The terror of the night. God is not naive about one in the morning. He knew there would be a kitchen and a cold tile floor and a man with a lit screen in his face, and the psalm walks straight up to that hour and calls it by its own name before it says anything else.

And look at what it puts against the fear. Not an explanation. Not a briefing. The verse just before says He will cover you with His pinions, and under His wings you will take shelter, and His faithfulness is a shield and a wall around you. That is the written answer to your hour, and it is the Spirit who brings it down over an actual house at an actual ten past one.

A covering. That is the whole answer, and it is a strange one until you have needed it.

A hen who hears a hawk does not gather the chicks and explain the hawk to them. She does not brief them on its wingspan and its habits and where it was last seen. She puts herself over them, and they are in the dark under her, and they know absolutely nothing, and they are safe. The safety was never in the knowing. It never once was.

You have been trying to become your own shield, and you have been trying to build that shield out of information, and I want you to notice something without any shame in it at all: it has not worked a single night yet. Not one. Two years of the most thorough watch anyone in your house has ever kept, and you have not bought one hour of peace with it.

That is not because you failed. It is because information was never a covering, and it was never meant to be, and God has not been asking you to be the wall around the people you love. Psalm 91:5 names the terror of the night and then hands the shield to somebody else entirely, and His Spirit has been holding it over that bed on every one of the two years you thought you were holding it yourself.