The Hand That Still Goes Out

The light at the top of the hill goes yellow and she comes off the gas, gently, the way she always does, with plenty of room.

There is nothing happening. That is the thing worth saying first. It is twenty past eight on a Tuesday, there is a delivery truck two cars ahead with its turn signal on, the radio is doing the traffic for a road nobody in this car is going to use, and there is a smell of the cheap pine air freshener that her son picked out at the gas station because he thought it was funny.

She brakes. And her right arm comes off the wheel and goes out flat across the passenger seat.

The seat is empty. It has been empty every single time. Her son is behind her in the back, headphones on, one shoe off, entirely unaware that anything has happened, because nothing has happened. The truck moves off. She puts her hand back on the wheel. The light goes green and she drives the last half mile to the school and pulls into the line of cars with all the other parents.

Four years. It has been four years, and it happens at every yellow light, and it happens when nobody is in the seat, and she has stopped mentioning it because the last time she did, somebody kind said something about trusting God more, and she nodded and changed the subject and drove home with her jaw set.

That is the part that costs her. Not the arm. The arm takes half a second and she is used to it. It is the sentence that arrives behind it, in her own voice, which is worse than anybody else's: if this were really finished, my body would know. And underneath that one, quieter still, the one she would never say out loud to a living soul: maybe I never actually believed any of it.

She drops him at the gate. He runs. She sits in the car for a minute in the line and looks at her own right hand on the wheel and thinks, honestly and without much drama, that she would like to be a person whose arm stays where it is.

You know that hand. Perhaps you have never been in a car in your life and it is a door closing too hard, or a phone ringing at an unusual hour, or a certain tone in somebody's voice, and something in you is up and braced before you have had a thought about it. And the flinch itself is over in a second. It is the second sentence that stays all day.

I have come to say something about that sentence, and it is not what you have been telling yourself. The arm going out is not a report on your faith. It is not evidence about your freedom. And there is a peace written into the Scriptures that was never once defined as a body behaving.

Peace was never the absence of the threat

There is a line David wrote that people put on cushions, and almost nobody reads the situation it was written into.

I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.Psalm 4:8

Look at the second half, because the second half is the whole sentence. He does not say: I will sleep because nothing is wrong. He does not say: I will sleep because my heart has stopped racing. He says he will sleep because of who is keeping the house. The threat is not reported as gone. The watchman is reported as awake.

That is what peace is in this book, all the way through. It is not a reading on your nervous system. It is a statement about who is on the roof. And it is worth noticing that the songbook of a whole nation kept the sleepless verses in it: elsewhere in the Psalms a man says God holds his eyes open and he is too troubled to speak. Nobody tidied that out. Whoever assembled the worship of that people left the shaking on the page, which is not what you do if the aim is to look impressive.

So hear the ground under this before we go a step further. Psalm 103 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a body that remembers what happened to it: you are held by a God who is not surprised by your right arm, and you were not put outside the peace of that verse by half a second on a hill.

The arm and the peace are not in the same category. They never were. One is a reflex and the other is a status, and asking your reflex whether your status is real is like asking the smoke alarm whether the house is paid for.

Four years, and no report card

Now the second sentence, the quiet one, because that is the one doing the damage.

It says that if the thing were truly over, the body would have got the memo, and since the body has not, something underneath must be missing. Faith, maybe. Or the real kind of faith. It never quite spells out what it is accusing you of, which is exactly how it stays.

Let me answer it plainly and from outside your own head. There is no verse anywhere that grades a flinch. Not one. The Scriptures are full of people whose bodies were in open rebellion against what they believed: Elijah under a tree asking to die a day after fire fell, Jeremiah unable to stop weeping, Paul writing that he came to a whole city in weakness and fear and much trembling and preaching the same gospel he had believed all along. His word keeps no chapter that measures a nervous system, and His Spirit is not running a private assessment behind it. You have a status that half a second on a hill cannot touch.

I am not going to tell you where your arm learned that. It is not mine to trace and I would only be guessing, and a guess would put a story on you that you did not agree to. What I will say is what it is doing now, which is quite different from what you think.

That arm goes out because it loves somebody. That is the actual mechanism. It is not the crash living on in you. It is the part of you that reaches sideways to hold another human being still, and it fires early because it would rather be early than late. It is not a wound with an opinion about God. It is love with fast hands.

That is not my sentimental reading of it either. It is what is written in Psalm 56, where the tears themselves are counted and put somewhere safe by God and written in His book, and the same Spirit who kept that image is at work in your car: it is already settled, and the settling included the parts of you that still move without asking.

One plain thing, late but not last. If what your body is carrying has gone past a flinch and into nights you cannot get through, or if any part of you has stopped wanting to be here, tell one human being today, out loud, and if you are in any danger reach the crisis line where you live and stay with it until somebody is with you. Nothing about this message asks you to handle it alone, and nothing in it should keep you from a doctor, a counselor or any care already in your hands.