Between the Call and the Appointment

The phone is still warm. That is the thing she keeps noticing, standing in the hallway with her arm down at her side and the phone in her hand, still warm from her own ear.

The call was four minutes and eleven seconds. It said so on the screen before it went dark. A woman with a kind voice who was reading from something and doing it carefully, who said the word just three times, the way people say it when they are trying to make a sentence smaller than it is. A name. A date, which is today. A time, which is quarter past four.

There is a coat on the hook by the door with one sleeve still inside out from yesterday. There is a bowl on the hall table with keys in it and a battery and a hair elastic. The afternoon light is coming through the glass panel in the front door and laying a long stripe of itself across the floorboards, and the stripe has moved since she started standing here, which means she has been standing here a while.

And her mind. Her mind went, immediately, the way a dog goes through a gate somebody left open.

It went to November. It was in November before the call had properly ended. It ran a conversation with her sister that has not happened. It stood in a room she has never been inside and made decisions about things she does not have words for yet. It got as far as a chair by a window somewhere and somebody bringing her something on a tray. It calculated. It rearranged. It looked at a calendar it invented and it worked out what would have to be moved.

It did all of that in about nine seconds, and then it came back and dropped her here, in her own hallway, holding a warm phone, and she is more tired now than she was before the call.

The clock in the kitchen says ten past three. Quarter past four is sixty five minutes away.

Sixty five minutes. And she has already lived a whole year in the hall.

Sixty five minutes is the only thing that is here

Look at what your mind did to you in the last few minutes, and then look at what it was actually holding when it got back.

Nothing. It was holding nothing, because November is not here. It cannot be picked up, prepared for, or negotiated with from a hallway at ten past three. Your mind ran out with both arms open and came home empty and spent, and it charged the whole trip to the hour you are actually standing in.

Here is a man who knew the feeling, writing while he was still in the middle of something unfinished.

My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me.Psalm 31:15

Notice that the word is plural. Not my time, singular, meaning the end of it. My times. All of the stretches. This afternoon, the sixty five minutes, quarter past four, and every hour that has not arrived and cannot be reached from here.

And then notice whose hand is named. It is not yours. The sentence is not my times are in my own hand and I had better manage them properly. That is the arrangement your mind has been operating under since the call ended, and it is the reason it came home exhausted. It has been trying to hold something that is already being held by somebody else.

You are not carrying November, and you were never handed it to carry. That is not me telling you to calm down. It is what Psalm 31:15 puts in writing, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line and unclenches an actual hand in an actual hallway.

You have this hour, and it is the only thing that has genuinely been given to you. The written word never once issues strength in advance of the hour it belongs to, and the Spirit who is with you now is with you now, which is the only place a person has ever been able to meet Him.

What your mind was trying to do

Be gentle with it. It was not sinning.

A mind that runs ahead after a phone call is doing the oldest protective thing a body knows how to do. It is trying to remove the surprise. It reasons, somewhere below words, that if it can get to every corner of the thing first, nothing can arrive that it has not already survived once in advance. It is not faithlessness. It is a watchman on a wall doing his job at four times the speed the wall requires.

But it costs, and here is the exact bill. It spends the strength of the hour you are in on an hour that does not exist yet, and then hands you the real hour with the tank low.

There is a picture of this in Exodus. The bread came down every morning, exactly enough, and the people who tried to gather a second day's worth found it spoiled by the next morning. That has been read at people as a scolding for centuries and it was never a scolding. It is a description of how the supply works. It arrives at the size of the day, in the day. Not because God is stingy with it, but because that is what keeps a person's hand inside His and not out in front of Him.

You are carried in this hour by the God whose hand your whole life sits inside, and the nine seconds your mind spent in November changed none of that. Psalm 31:15 does not have a clause about how well you waited, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a written thing true in a body that is still shaking a little.

You have strength for sixty five minutes, and it is already yours, and it is not being measured against anything except these sixty five minutes. That is how His word gives it and that is how the Spirit administers it, one hour at a time, into an open hand.