You Are Not Losing Your Mind

The third time she comes back down the corridor, she puts her whole hand flat on the stove knob so she can feel that it is cold.

It is cold. It was cold the first time. She stood there ninety seconds ago and looked at it and said the word out loud, off, because someone told her that saying it out loud helps you remember. She said it. She walked away. She got as far as the bedroom door. And the picture arrived anyway, the one that always arrives, the small blue flame nobody is watching, and the house, and the stairs, and the people asleep at the top of them. So she is back. Hand flat, metal cold, breathing.

She is not a fragile woman. She ran a department for nine years. She is the one everybody rings when there is a problem. And she is standing barefoot in her own kitchen at ten past three in the morning, and the thought she cannot say to anybody has just said itself again, quietly, from somewhere behind her ribs: something is wrong with me. I am going. This is what it looks like when a person starts to go.

I want you to notice she has not called anyone. That is the part I need you to see, because that is the part I recognize. She has hidden this so carefully that the people who love her think she sleeps well. And now I stop calling her she, because you and I both know who is standing in that kitchen. It is you. You have been frightened of your own mind for a while now, and you have not said it out loud to one living soul, because saying it out loud has felt like signing something. Come and sit down at the table with me. I am not signing anything and neither are you.

What happens to a sentry nobody ever relieves

Let me name your low place accurately, because you deserve to be seen in it before anybody tries to lift you out of it.

It is not only the fear. It is the second fear, the one about the first one. It is reading a sentence four times and understanding none of it. It is the word that will not come at the meeting. It is the heart going at a speed that makes no sense in a stationary car. It is lying still at four in the morning doing arithmetic on how many hours are left. It is the hot flood of dread that arrives before you have thought of anything to dread, so it feels like a message from your own body that something terrible is already true. And underneath all of it, the sentence you would not say to your own mother: I think I am losing my grip on my own mind.

Hear me. That is not what is happening to you. I am not guessing at that: 2 Timothy 1:7 rules out the spirit you have been afraid is yours, and the Spirit who is actually in you is not the one making the noise at ten past three.

I keep the third watch, from midnight to three. I know exactly what a watchman looks like on the eleventh hour of a post that was meant to be three hours long. He does not look brave and he does not look broken. He looks like someone who has stopped being able to tell a shadow from a man. Not because he is failing. Because nobody came to relieve him, and a sentry who is never relieved does not become a bad sentry. He becomes an exhausted one, and exhaustion looks a great deal like danger from the inside.

That is your mind. It is not turning against you. It is standing guard, and it has been standing guard for months, and it is scanning your kitchen at three in the morning for the same reason a tired watchman scans a hillside: because nobody has told it that the danger is being covered by someone else.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.2 Timothy 1:7

Read that last phrase again. A sound mind. Not a mind that never races. Not a mind that has never woken up at three. A sound mind, which in that sentence is a gift already given, in the past tense, to people who were frightened enough that Paul had to write it down for them.

Now let me carry you across two things, gently, because nobody has ever been argued into peace.

The first: God still steps into rooms and changes what is happening in them. He has not gone quiet, He has not handed the world over, He is not somewhere in the past tense. The peace that stood up in a boat and spoke to weather is not a story about weather. It is a demonstration of who has authority over things that will not stop moving, and your mind at three in the morning is a thing that will not stop moving.

The second, and this is the harder one for you: it is for you. Not for calmer people. Not for the ones whose faith looks tidy. You have quietly decided that peace is for people who are less broken than you have become, and I have come to take that decision out of your hands, because it is not yours to make and it was never true. That line was written down for somebody frightened rather than somebody tidy. The Spirit does not check the state of your nerves at the door before handing over what was given long ago.

And while I have your attention: tell your doctor. Tell the counselor. Take the appointment you have been putting off. There is no holiness in going untreated, none at all, and the God who made your body made the people who study it. Nothing I am saying to you tonight replaces one word of that.