Third From the Left

The recorders start before the hall is quiet, the way they always do, eleven seven year olds and one teacher counting them in with her whole arm. Plastic chairs in rows, the smell of floor polish and orange squash, somebody's baby brother being walked up and down at the back. Her son is third from the left. He has his recorder held too high and his eyes on the teacher's arm, and he is playing every note as if the note is the most important thing in the room, because to him it is.

She has the program on her knee and the phone under the program.

They took the sample on Tuesday. The nurse was kind and quick and said the words everybody says: nobody will call before next week, try not to worry. That was two days ago. The call cannot come tonight. It cannot come tomorrow. It cannot come at the weekend. She knows this the way she knows her own name, and she has turned the phone over under the program four times since the lights went down, and each time it is only the lock screen and the photo of him in the paddling pool, and each time her stomach drops and then does not lift all the way back.

Because the waiting is not empty. That is what nobody tells you. She has been furnishing it. She knows which chair in the kitchen she will be sitting in when they tell her. She has decided how she will say it to her sister and which words she will not use in front of him. She has been to the worst so many times in two days that the worst has a layout, and she can walk round it in the dark without touching anything.

The recorders reach the end of the piece, more or less together, and there is the small storm of clapping that a school hall makes. And third from the left, he lowers the recorder and looks for her. Fourth row, left of the aisle, where he knows she is. He looks straight at her seat.

She catches the tail of it. She had been looking at the phone.

And this is you. Not a hall, maybe, not recorders. But you know the days between the sample and the call, and you know that they cannot ring yet, and you know that you check anyway. And you know the worst place, the one you have furnished, and you know exactly how much of Thursday it has taken from you while the phone lay there knowing nothing.

Somebody already knows what the call will say

Let me say the low place plainly, because you would hear anything smoother as somebody who has never sat in that hall. This is eight days that are not yours. Your mind has gone ahead of you to Tuesday week and is living there, and it goes back and forth on its own, and it takes the good hours with it when it goes. It is not weakness, and it is not unbelief; Scripture is full of people whose minds ran ahead of them in the night, and the Holy Spirit never once shamed one of them for it. A mind that runs to the worst is a mind trying to protect you by getting there first, so that nothing can catch you unready. But it means the boy looks for you and you are not in your seat. You are eight days away in a room that does not exist yet.

So here is the first thing, and I want it under you before anything else. There is a psalm that says something almost too big to hold, and it says it in one line:

For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.Psalm 139:4

David is talking about his own words. But look at what he is actually saying about God: a sentence that has not been spoken yet, that nobody has formed yet, that is not on any tongue anywhere, and He knows it altogether. Not roughly. Not likely. Altogether. And a few lines later David says every one of his days was written in God's book before one of them came (Psalm 139:16). Not the good ones. All of them, including Tuesday week.

You have a God who already knows what the call will say, and He is not waiting to find out. I am not guessing that; it is written, in a psalm, by a man who was hunted for years and knew what waiting does to a mind, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that line off the page and sets it down on the plastic chair beside you. The words that will come down the phone next week are not on anyone's tongue yet. They are already known altogether. He is not in the waiting room with a number. He is at Tuesday week already, and He is here in the hall on Thursday, and both are the same to Him.

What He said, and what I will not say

I have to be honest with you about two things at once, and I am going to hold them in the same hand, because a person in your seat can tell when somebody drops one of them. God heals. That is His written word about bodies, not a slogan, and I am not going to soften it because the days are hard. And I do not know what the call will say, and I am not going to tell you. Not the good version and not the bad one. Anybody who promises you a result from a school hall is guessing in a kind voice, and I am not going to do that to you.

What I can tell you is what He is doing in the between, because that is what the psalm is about. He knows the sentence altogether. He wrote the days. And you were carried into this Thursday by the same hands that are already holding Tuesday week, and there is no day in the eight that He has not been in first. That is Scripture and not sentiment, and it is His Spirit who makes it something you can lean the weight of a mind on and not just a verse you nod at. If the call is the one you fear, this stays exactly as true. He knew it on Thursday and He was holding you on Thursday, and He is not less near in a hard result than in a good one. If the call is the one you hope for, it will not have been the news that held you. It will have been Him, all eight days.

Where a mind can lean

There is an old line in Isaiah about peace, and the word for the mind in it is not the word for a mind that grips. It is closer to a mind that leans, that is propped, that puts its weight on something and stops holding itself up.

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.Isaiah 26:3

Read the verbs. You keep. He is not asking you to keep your own mind in peace for eight days; He knows you cannot, He knows nobody can, that is why the verse says You keep. Stayed is not gripped. It is leaned. A mind that has been running to Tuesday week and back on its own is a mind carrying its own weight, and this is the verse that says there is somewhere to set it down.

You have a mind that is not running this alone, and it was never asked to. He keeps, the word says, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the keeping from the inside, at the pace of a Thursday, not the pace of the worst you have furnished. So when the phone goes over in your hand again, and it will, that is not a failure. That is a mind that has forgotten for a second where it can lean. Lean it back. Say the sentence. Then look at the stage.

Because that is the other thing about the days between. They are days. He is third from the left in one of them, and he is looking for you.

One more thing, because eight days is a long time to hold a mind up. If the waiting has taken you somewhere darker than frightened, if you find yourself not wanting to be here for the call, tell one human being tonight and not next week. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who will stay on the phone. This page cannot do that job, and you should not be alone in it.