The Appointment Where They Tell You

There is one entry in the calendar this week and it says almost nothing. Ten forty, Thursday. Room four. He typed it in standing up, in a corridor, with a receptionist waiting, and he has opened it eleven times since.

Tuesday night, twenty to eleven. The television is on and he could not tell you what is happening on it. There is a mug on the arm of the sofa that went cold about an hour ago and has grown that gray skin tea gets, and he keeps picking it up and putting it down without drinking any of it, which is a thing he has done four times now.

He has already been to Thursday. That is the part nobody sees. He has sat in that chair perhaps forty times since Friday. He knows the weight of the door. He knows the sound the chair makes on the floor when he pulls it in. He knows the exact half second where the person across the desk looks down at the screen and then looks up, and he has watched that face change in about six different ways, and every one of them was invented, and every one of them cost him something real.

He is not a coward. He held it together at work today. He made somebody laugh at half past two.

Then he gets up to put the bin out because it is bin night and the ordinary world keeps its schedule, and he goes out through the hall and opens the front door, and the cold comes in, and he does not go back inside. He sits down on his own front step under the porch light with the bin bag still in his hand.

And I am going to stop saying he now.

Because you know the entry. You know it is two lines long and it has eaten your whole week. You know the hour of the night when your chest gets tight for no reason your body can point at, and you know how it feels to rehearse a conversation that has not happened, over and over, until you are exhausted by news you have not been given. You have been quietly bracing since Friday. Bracing is work. It burns something. That is why you are so tired and cannot explain it to anyone.

And underneath all of it there is a second fear that you have not said out loud, and it is not about the results at all. It is that you are afraid, and you think you are not supposed to be.

So you sit on the step in the cold with a bin bag in your hand, and Thursday is still two days away, and there is nobody out here.

Your fear is not a verdict on your trust

I want to say the first thing very plainly, because I think you have been carrying it for days and nobody has taken it off you.

You are not failing at faith. Your fear is not evidence against you. Fear is what a body does when it loves being alive and something has come near the edge of that. It is old equipment doing its honest job with incomplete information, and it has been running since Friday because nobody has given it anything new to work with. That is not a spiritual defect. It is a nervous system, and God made it, and He is not standing over it shaking His head. Nowhere does the word scold a frightened body. It puts a hand on it. And the Holy Spirit came out onto that step with you at twenty to eleven, rather than waiting at the far end of Thursday for a calmer version of you to turn up.

Anybody who tells you that a Christian with real trust would be calm about Thursday has never sat on a cold step at twenty to eleven with a bin bag in their hand. Do not let that voice have the room tonight.

Now the honest part, and then the better part.

The honest part is that the waiting is its own affliction, separate from whatever is actually true about you. You are not being tested by the news; you are being worn down by the gap before it. Forty rehearsals in five days is not you being dramatic. It is your mind trying to get in front of something so it cannot hurt you, and it has never once worked, and it has cost you your sleep, and I am sorry. And you are not out in that cold on your own, whatever the step under you feels like. Psalm 34:18 puts God nearest to the person whose heart is in pieces, not furthest, and His Spirit has sat through all forty of those rehearsals without once calling them dramatic.

Here is what I want to put in your hands for the next two nights.

There was a day when an entire people stood at a border and the one man who had led them for forty years told them he was not coming with them. Moses was a hundred and twenty. Everything constant was ending in one afternoon. And in front of the whole nation he turned to Joshua, who was about to walk into the room where it all got decided, and said this:

And the LORD, He is the one walking before your face. He is with you. He does not let go of you and does not forsake you. Do not be afraid and do not be dismayed.Deuteronomy 31:8

Read the order of it. It matters more than anything else in this message.

He does not open with do not be afraid. He opens with where God is standing. Walking before your face. Ahead. In front. God is not waiting to see how Thursday goes so He can respond with you; He is already in the corridor, already in room four, already at ten forty, and He has been there since before the letter was printed. He arrives first. That is what walking before your face means.

Then, after that, and only after that, comes do not be afraid. It is not a rebuke and it is not a test you are currently failing. It is what you say to somebody once you have shown them the ground under their feet. It is the sentence that comes second.

And look at the two verbs in the middle, because they are the ones I would fold up and put in your coat pocket. He does not let go of you. He does not forsake you. The first is about His grip and the second is about His presence, and between them there is no gap where you could fall through. He is not going to loosen His hand when the person across the desk starts talking. He is not going to step out of the room to give you privacy for the hard part. Both of those verbs are written down, and neither one is conditional on how you sleep between now and then. The Spirit is what brings them out to a front step in the cold, instead of leaving them a sentence about a border crossing three thousand years ago.

You have been rehearsing Thursday alone. You have never once, in any of those forty rehearsals, put Him in the room. Put Him in the room.