The Comb Across the Armrest

The comb lies across the armrest of her own chair, and she has not sat down in that chair once since eight o'clock this morning.

It is Tuesday afternoon, the braiding shop two doors along from the nail place, and for the first time in five hours nobody is waiting on her hands. Her four o'clock has not come in yet. The shop smells of shea butter and hot water and somebody's lunch going cold in a takeout box. The radio is up, the way it always is, the station that plays the same eleven songs all day and lets a person be alone in a room full of people. Two chairs over, a woman is laughing so hard she has to hold her own head still so the part does not slip. In the back, a baby is asleep in a stroller with a receiving blanket thrown over the handle. Around the sink there is that soft loose hair on the floor that never fully sweeps up.

She sits. She puts her hands in her lap, which is the strangest feeling in the world after five hours of holding somebody's head steady, and she takes out her phone, and she opens the page.

She has read it eleven times. She knows it is eleven because she started counting somewhere around the seventh. It says exactly what it said on Friday. Nothing on it has changed, nothing on it is going to change before her appointment, and she reads it again anyway, slowly, the way a person presses a sore place to check that it is still sore. I am not going to tell you what it says. It is hers, and the words on it are not the point of this page.

Here is the point. In this shop there are six women who love her. Three of them she has known since middle school. One of them braided her hair when she was nine years old and could not sit still for it. And in eleven readings across five days, she has not said one sentence of it out loud to a single one of them, because the four o'clock is always coming, because everybody in here is carrying their own thing, because how do you even begin that sentence with a comb in your hand and a section between your fingers.

And underneath that there is something she only noticed today, sitting down. It is not only that she has said nothing to them. She has said nothing out loud to God about it either. She has thought it a hundred times, in the shower, on the bus, at the sink with the water running. But in five days, in this room or any other, not one word that God has spoken about a human body has been said out loud over hers, in her own voice, by anybody.

That is you, perhaps, in your own chair between two other people's appointments. You know that page. You could recite that page. And the thing God has said, the thing that was written down long before any of this began, has been sitting in your chest all week with nowhere to go and nobody to say it to.

The room is full and the sentence has nowhere to go

Let me say the first thing gently, because you are tired and I am not here to add to the pile.

Nothing on this page asks you to argue with what you read on that phone. It is a true page. The people caring for your body trained for years to write it and to read it, and their care is a good gift, and nothing here tells you to stop it, change it, delay it or set it against prayer. Keep your appointments. The God who hears you is not in competition with the people looking after your body. You hold both, the way a woman holds a comb in one hand and a section in the other, and neither hand is fighting the other one.

But there is a second thing that has been said about your body, and it has not yet had a voice in your room.

There is a line in the longest psalm in the book, written by somebody so far into an affliction that he had time to write a hundred and seventy six verses about it. He does not tell us it ended. He tells us what kept him upright while it was still going on. Read it slowly, the way you would read something to a child.

This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath quickened me.Psalm 119:50

Comfort in the affliction. Not comfort instead of it, not comfort on the other side of it once the paperwork is clean. In it. And the reason he gives is not that he understood the affliction, or that somebody explained it, or that he found the key that made it lift. The reason is that a word revived him. Something written outside of him got inside him and put life back into a man who was running out of it.

You have a word standing over this body that was spoken long before the page in your hand was ever typed. That is not my encouragement and it is not positive thinking; Psalm 119:50 is written, it was written for people in the middle of things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written and makes it live in a room. I did not invent it and you do not have to manufacture it. It is true in a noisy shop on a Tuesday.

Quickened is a word about right now

Here is the pit I want to name, because I think you are standing in it and it is not your doing.

A body that hears one word eleven times and the other word not once will begin to treat the first word as the only word in the world. Not because the reader is faithless. Because that is what happens to human beings in a room. Whatever gets said out loud takes up the room. Nobody failed to have enough faith here. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true, and if somebody has said it to you, however kindly they meant it, you may set it down and leave it on the floor with the loose hair.

So the question is not whether you believe hard enough. The question is far smaller and far kinder than that. It is whether anything God says has been given a voice in the room where you actually live.

Right now, as you read, the same Spirit who carried that written sentence to a man in his own long trouble is carrying it into a braiding shop with the radio on. He does not need quiet. He does not need a platform, a conference, a better week, or a better version of you.

And let me say the honest thing, the thing this whole site stands on, in the same breath. God heals. I believe that plainly and I will not soften it for anybody: it is written, His Spirit still does it, and He has never stopped. And I do not promise you a result. I cannot and I will not, because the day I promise you an outcome is the day I have made myself God and made your body the proof of it. What I can put in your hands is what He has actually said. What He does with it is His to decide, and He is good in either case.

You were given a voice for this, and it is the same voice you have been using all day long for everybody else. The word in your mouth is not a technique and there is no correct way to hold it; the Spirit carries what is written, and the written thing is already true whether your voice shakes on it or not.

And one more thing, because I mean it, and I would say it to you with my hand on your shoulder. If this has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking the people around you would have an easier time without you here, tell one human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can come and sit with you tonight. A page cannot do that part. You deserve a person beside you, and there is no shame anywhere in this.