Fourth in the Line

The line moves up one and Tariq rolls forward with it, fourth car now, close enough to the front to smell the bread from the place on the corner.

The phone is face up on the dash where he put it on Monday morning. It has been there ever since. It goes to sleep and he wakes it with the back of his knuckle, without deciding to, maybe every four minutes, and the screen shows him the time and nothing else, and he puts his hand back on the wheel.

Four days into a seven day wait.

He has worked all four. That is the strange part. He has taken fares to the north side and out past the depot and twice to the airport, and if you stopped him now and asked him about any of them he could not tell you a single face. Somebody talked to him about a wedding. Somebody left a scarf on the back seat and he has it in the trunk. He has been polite, and he has been present in the way a man is present when he has left a window open somewhere else.

And in the gaps, at every red light and every time the line moves up, he does the thing. He runs day seven. He runs the version where the news is bad, and then he runs how he tells his mother, and then he runs the six months after that, in detail, with dialogue, and by the time the light turns green he has lived the whole thing and none of it has happened and he is tired in a way that sleep does not touch.

He knows it does not help. He would tell you so himself. Forty times in four days, and not one of those rehearsals has changed a single thing that is going to be in that phone call.

The line moves up. Third car now. He wakes the screen with his knuckle again.

That is you, perhaps. Working, driving, polite, and living out a week that has not arrived yet.

The four days you cannot get back

The cruelty of rehearsing is that it feels responsible.

It feels like getting ready. It feels like a man being sensible about a hard thing rather than being caught out by it. That is why nobody can talk you out of it by telling you it is pointless, because you already know it is pointless and you are doing it anyway. Rehearsal is not a decision. It is what an unguarded mind does with an unfinished week.

And I will not tell you which way this goes. I do not know. Nobody writing to you knows, and anyone who tells you they have a feeling about your seventh day is offering you a coin toss with a warm voice on it. If it turns out well, this page is still true. If it turns out badly, this page is still true, word for word, and I wrote it that way on purpose, because a piece of writing that only works for the good outcome is a trap laid for the person who gets the other one.

So here is what there is. Not a prediction. A guard.

And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.Philippians 4:7

Look at the word keep. In the original it is a soldier's word, the one used for a garrison posted at the gate of a city. It is not a blanket laid over you. It is somebody armed, standing where the road comes in, deciding what gets through to your heart and your mind.

You are guarded tonight by a peace that never asked you to understand anything first. Philippians 4:7 says it passes understanding, which means it does not run on information, and the Holy Spirit is the one who posts it, not the steadiness of a man who has slept badly for four nights.

That is the mercy in it. If the peace of God depended on understanding, you could not have any until Friday. It does not. It comes in ahead of the facts, which is exactly the order a waiting man needs it in.

What the guard is standing in front of

Notice what Philippians 4:7 says the guard is set over. Your hearts and your minds. Not your circumstances. Not your seventh day. The verse does not say the peace of God keeps your news good. It says the peace of God keeps you.

That distinction is the whole category. A man in a seven day wait is not actually being destroyed by the wait. He is being worn through by forty rehearsals, and the rehearsals happen inside the two places God specifically named.

You have a garrison at the gate of your mind that was posted through Christ Jesus and not through your nerve. What is written in Philippians 4:7 puts the peace on Him, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is the one who walks it into a car in a taxi line at eleven in the morning.

And I want to be careful with you here, because this is where somebody usually adds a condition. Nobody is about to tell you that if you had been calmer you would have had more peace. That sentence is not in the letter Paul wrote and it is not true. He wrote it from a prison cell to people who were anxious, and he did not scold them for being anxious. He told them where to put it and who stands at the gate afterward.

You were not asked to produce this peace, and it is not a reward for handling the week well. It is written that it comes through Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it in, which is why it can arrive on a day when you have nothing left to bring to it.