When I Am Afraid

The wind takes the café door and slams it against the stop, and her shoulders are up before the tea has stopped moving in the cup.

Nobody else in the queue has noticed. The man in front is paying. The woman behind her is on the phone about a parcel. The barista says sorry about that, the catch is going, and goes back to the milk. It is a Tuesday and it is bright and the room is full of ordinary people doing ordinary things, and she is standing in the middle of them with her whole body listening for the next thing, and there is no next thing. There has not been a next thing for years. The thing that taught her body to do this is over, finished, gone, and she knows it, and her body did not get the message.

She lets her shoulders down by hand. That is what it feels like: a decision, made with muscles, the way you would set down a bag. Her friend at the window table looks up and smiles and she smiles back and carries the tea over and sits, and the conversation picks up where it left off, and nobody in the room knows that for four seconds she was somewhere else entirely.

And here is the part that hurts, the part she would never say at that table. It is not the flinch. She can carry the flinch. It is what the flinch seems to say about her. If I were really free, this would not happen. If I really believed it was over, my body would believe it too. Every slammed door has become a small verdict, and she has been reading the verdict against herself for years, in cafés and car parks and her own kitchen, and nobody has ever told her the verdict is not real.

You are the one at the counter. Your body braces at a sound the world stopped making a long time ago, and I am not going to ask you what the sound was, and I am not going to tell you where it comes from, because I do not know and it is not mine to say. What I have to say is smaller and it is written down. It is about the word when.

The flinch is not the verdict

I want to name the weight before I say a word about God, because a person who has been reading a verdict against themselves for years does not need it read faster. The reflex is real. It lives in the body and it does not consult you. It arrives before thought, it stays as long as it stays, and then it goes, and what it leaves behind is not the fear so much as the shame of the fear, the sense that a free person would not have flinched. That is the pit, and it is a deep one, because it turns your own body into a witness against you.

Now hear this over you, at the counter, and hear who is speaking, because it is not me. You are free, and the flinch has not changed that by one degree, and God is here inside the remembering and not standing outside it waiting for you to stop. I am speaking the written word: on the day I am afraid, I put my trust in You. Not if. When. And the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that sentence a place to stand instead of a line in a book.

When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.Psalm 56:3

Read the first word again. When. The man who wrote that psalm did not say I no longer get afraid, and he did not say a person of faith would not be afraid, and he did not apologize for the fear before he got to the trust. He put them in the same breath. When I am afraid, then, at that moment, still afraid, I put my trust in You. The fear and the trust are not two rooms; they are one sentence. You have permission from Scripture itself to be afraid and trusting in the same four seconds, and His Spirit is the one who holds both halves of that sentence together in a body that is still bracing.

That is why I said the word when is the whole of what I brought. Your body may go on answering doors for a long time. I do not know, and I will not tell you it stops, because that is not mine to promise and a promise nobody was authorized to make does harm when it fails. What I can tell you is what the psalm tells you: the trust does not wait for the flinch to be over. It goes in with it.

He is in the remembering

Here is the lie that has been standing next to you in every queue, and I name it so it can be evicted. It says the flinch means you are still inside. It says freedom would look like a body that never braces, and since yours does, you must not have it yet, and so the door that Christ opened must somehow still be shut on you.

Hear me. Freedom is not a feeling in the shoulders. It is a status, and Christ settled it, and it does not go up and down with your pulse. You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear; Scripture says you received the Spirit by whom you cry Abba, Father, and He is in you while your shoulders are still up. He does not leave when the door slams. He is not embarrassed by the four seconds. He is the One in whom you cry Father, and a person crying Father from inside a flinch is not a slave who forgot they were freed. They are a child whose body remembers something and whose Father is right there in the remembering.

I know something of a body that remembers ground. There is a slope I walk where fire went through, and it has been green again for years, and I still smell smoke on it in certain weather when there is none. The land is not still burning. My body learned it once and keeps the lesson. That is not unbelief in the green. It is memory, and God walks the slope with me in the smell of smoke as surely as in the green. You are hedged behind and before, and it is written that His hand is laid on you, and that hand does not lift when the door goes; His Spirit keeps it there.

And one thing I need to say plainly. If the bracing has become something you cannot live inside, if the nights have gone somewhere dark, then tell one human being today, and if you are in any danger reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Getting help for a body that remembers is not a failure of freedom. It is what a free person is allowed to do.