Fine at the Counter

The milk delivery is short by two crates and the new lad has burnt the first batch of croissants, and she says, "Right, we'll manage," in the voice everybody in the building has come to rely on.

She means it, too. That is what nobody understands about the voice. It is not a lie. From seven until eleven she is the calmest person in the café, and the café runs on it. The regular with the bad hip gets his usual without asking. The girl on the till who is going through something gets a hand on the shoulder and a "you're all right" that steadies her for an hour. Two suppliers ring, one of them cross, and she talks both of them down while writing a stock list on the back of a receipt. Somebody says, "I don't know how you do it," and she says, "Neither do I," and everybody laughs, and it is true, and it is a joke, and it is not.

At eleven she goes into the walk-in fridge for the cream.

It is not the cold. It is the door closing behind her and the hum of the compressor covering everything, and it is the milk crates stacked against the back wall, four high, that nobody looks at. She sits on the bottom one. She does not decide to. Her legs decide. And there, among the cream and the sliced ham and the box of lemons, she comes apart for as long as the cream can plausibly take to find, which is about ninety seconds, and then she wipes her face with the inside of her wrist and picks up the cream and goes back out.

"Found it," she says. "Right. Where were we?"

You have a walk-in fridge of your own. Perhaps it is a car, or a stairwell, or the toilet on the second floor. But you know the ninety seconds, and you know the wrist, and you have been quietly deciding, for longer than you would say out loud, that the woman at the counter is a fraud and the woman on the milk crate is the truth. Or the other way round. You are not sure which. That is the exhaustion nobody sees: not the holding together, but the not knowing which one is you.

He knows the counter and He knows the crate

Let me name the weight first, because it has been carried a long time and it deserves naming before anything is lifted. It is not the café. It is that there are two of you, and never once has there been a room where both of them were allowed at the same time. One of them is needed and the other is hidden, and somewhere along the way you concluded that whichever one is hidden must be the one that is not allowed. That is a heavy thing to run a morning on.

Now here is the psalm David wrote about being known, and I want you to notice which parts of him it says God knows.

You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:3

Not some of my ways. All. The verse before it says God knows my sitting down and my rising up, which is a merism, two ends naming the whole: the counter and the crate, the standing and the falling, and every hour between. David did not write that God knows the version of him he brought to the palace. He wrote that there is no version God does not know, and then, astonishingly, he called that comforting.

You are known in the walk-in fridge exactly as much as at the counter. That is Scripture, not sentiment: acquainted with all my ways, and all is not a word God uses loosely. And the one who searches you out is not a supervisor with a clipboard; the same psalm says His Spirit is somewhere you can never get away from, which David wrote as relief and not as threat. Nobody has to keep the performance up for the God who is already in the back room.

I understand the performance. I have watched people hold a room together with a voice, and I do not despise it, and neither does He. Strength you have given other people all morning is real strength, and it has been going out of you at a rate nobody has been measuring. What I want you to hear is that God has been measuring it, and He has not sent an invoice. You have a Father who saw the ninety seconds and did not flinch, and did not think less of the counter because of the crate. Hebrews 4:15 says our high priest is touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and touched is a word about contact, not about opinion. The Holy Spirit does not stand outside the fridge door waiting for you to compose yourself.

And there is a garden in the gospels I want you to stand in for a moment. The strongest man who ever lived, on the last night of His life, took three friends a little way from the others and said, in plain words, that His soul was sorrowful to the point of death, and He fell on His face. Jesus did not hold it together in Gethsemane. He came apart, in front of the Father and three men who kept falling asleep, and it was not weakness and nobody has ever called it that. He was known there. He was heard there. And He was carried from there to everything He had come to do.