Two O'Clock on Nothing

There are four blue chairs bolted in a row outside the office, and Nell is in the second one because the first one felt too much like being first.

Her coat is folded over her arm. There is no hook. She has been holding it for eleven minutes now and her arm has started to ache in the particular way an arm aches when you are holding something you could easily put on the chair beside you and have not.

In her other hand there is a piece of paper folded into quarters, and on it, in her own handwriting from Thursday night, three things.

She has been rehearsing them since Thursday. In the car. At the sink. At twenty past four this morning, lying on her side facing the wall with her eyes open, running the sentences the way you run a tongue over a tooth that hurts. By Saturday she had them. By Sunday she had them in a better order. She knew exactly how she was going to say the second one, which is the hard one, the one about how she cannot do the nights anymore.

And at ten to two, sitting in the second blue chair with a water cooler humming in the corner and afternoon light coming in low across the carpet tiles, Nell cannot remember the third thing.

She looks at the paper. The paper says it. She reads it and it goes in and comes straight back out, like water on a road that has been dry too long.

This is the part nobody warns you about. Not the dread. The dread she knows, the dread has been sitting next to her since Thursday like a passenger. What she was not ready for is the emptiness that arrives about ten minutes before, when the adrenaline that was supposed to carry you in has quietly not turned up, and you discover that you have spent everything you had on the rehearsing.

Somebody comes out of the office and says: she will be about five more minutes, is that all right.

Nell says yes, that is fine, in a voice that is completely steady, because that voice is the last thing still working.

She looks at her hands. One coat. One piece of paper. Cold fingers. And a thought arrives with a clarity that frightens her: I have nothing to bring in there.

Not nothing to say. She has the paper. Nothing to bring. No reserve, no lift, no second wind, nothing underneath the words that would make her able to survive saying them out loud to somebody with a form.

Ten to two. The radiator ticks. The light moves about an inch along the carpet.

The verse everybody has seen and nobody has read

Psalm 46:1 has been printed on so much bathroom decor that it has almost stopped being a sentence. Read it slowly anyway, because it is not a slogan, and it is not a motivational line about how your weakness is secretly an advantage. It is a plain statement about where something is kept.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.Psalm 46:1

Look at what the sentence does with its nouns. God is refuge. God is strength. Not God gives strength to those who go and get some, not God rewards the ones who arrive with a bit of their own. He is the thing itself. Strength here is not a substance handed out at a counter, it is a Person who is where you are.

And then the middle of the line, which is the part that matters at ten to two: a very present help. Present is a location word. It does not describe how much He cares, it describes where He is standing, and where He is standing is here, in the row of blue chairs, before the door opens.

You are not walking into that room alone, and the company did not have to be arranged by you this morning. That is not my encouragement. It is what is written in Psalm 46:1, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a sentence off a wall plaque and makes it an actual presence in an actual corridor with a humming water cooler.

Notice too where the help is addressed. In trouble. Not before it, as a preparation you should have done better. Not after it, as a recovery. In it. The help has the same address as the trouble.

You have a help that is already inside the two o'clock room. The written word puts it there, not my optimism about your afternoon, and the Spirit of God is the One who goes in ahead rather than waiting to see how you do.

Strength that is not a supply of you

Here is the thing about the emptiness that arrived at ten to two, and I want to say it carefully, because this is where a lot of writing about strength does real damage.

Your emptiness is not a qualification. Nobody is telling you to be glad about it, or to seek out more of it, or to read it as evidence that God is about to do something. That is a way of making a person's exhaustion useful, and a tired woman in a corridor is not required to be useful. Your emptiness is simply the true state of a person who has spent four days rehearsing, and it is allowed to be nothing more interesting than that.

But it does change one thing. It removes the question of whether you are going in on your own strength, because there is not any. The question has been settled by circumstances, and what is left is only whether there is another kind.

Psalm 46:1 says there is, and says it is a Person, and says He is here.

You were never the source, and finding that out at ten to two is not a failure of preparation. Scripture calls God our refuge and strength without ever asking the psalmist to contribute a percentage, and His Spirit does not stand at the office door taking an inventory of what you managed to bring.

And notice the size of what is offered. A help in trouble. This particular trouble. Not a lifetime supply, not a personality upgrade, not a promise about how the rest of the year goes. One room. One conversation. One two o'clock.

This is yours for the length of that meeting, and it does not have to stretch any further than the door on the way out. The word is specific about where the help lives, and the Spirit is the One who makes a specific old promise arrive at a specific new hour.