Woodsmoke on the Wind

It comes over the ridge with the wind and it is on her before she has any say in the matter.

Norah is four hundred yards up the track with a basket on her arm, walking the way she walks every Thursday, past the leaning gate and the culvert and the place where the blackberries were. The trees have turned. The light is low and coming in sideways the way it does in the third week of October, and somebody down in the valley has lit their first fire of the season, and the smoke has climbed the hill and found her.

She stops dead. Not slows. Stops, with one boot half lifted, the way an animal stops.

Her hands go cold first, which she has never been able to explain to anybody, because it is a warm smell and a warm memory of a thing that was not warm at all. Then her chest tightens up under the coat. Then, about a second and a half behind all of it, her mind catches up and says the sensible thing it always says, which is: that is the Hendersons' chimney, that is a woodstove, it is October, everything is fine.

It has been nine years. The barn is not there anymore and neither is anything that was in it. The ground where it stood has been grass so long there are trees in it now, whips of ash coming up along where the west wall used to be. Norah has been through every part of what came after. She rebuilt. She kept going. There is nothing left of that night except a shape in the grass, and a smell that gets over the ridge before she can do anything about it.

She stands on the track and waits for her chest to come down. It takes about as long as it always takes. Then she moves the boot she was holding in the air, and puts it down, and starts walking again, and she is angry in a tired way that she cannot say out loud to anybody, because what she would have to say is: nine years, and it still owns four seconds of my Thursday.

That is the part nobody sees. Not the four seconds. The verdict she reads out of the four seconds. That her body knows something her theology does not. That underneath everything she has said and sung and believed since, some true and stubborn part of her is still standing in the yard at two in the morning, and every flinch is a fresh piece of evidence.

You are the one on the track. I am not going to ask what the smell is for you or when it started, because that is yours and it is not mine to open. But I know a body that stops before its owner gets a vote, and I know what a woman starts to conclude about herself when it happens for the ninth year running. So I have come up the hill and I am walking beside you, and I want to take one thing out of your hands before we go another step: the idea that the flinch is the verdict.

A Very Present Help, and Present Means Now

Let me name the weight before I lift a finger toward it, because it is not the weight anybody would guess from the outside.

The smell is not the weight. The smell is four seconds. The weight is what those four seconds seem to prove: that the fire is still in you somewhere with the door open, that everything built since sits on top of something that never actually went out. That is a hard thing to carry alone up a hill on a Thursday, and it is heavier than the flinch by a hundred times.

So here is the word, and it is worth reading slowly, because most of us have heard it so often that we hear the tune and not the words.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.Psalm 46:1

Very present. Not nearby. Not on His way. Not waiting at the top of the track for you to arrive composed. The word carries the sense of a help abundantly found, right there, at the point of the trouble. Which means He is not in the part afterward where you have got your breath back and can think again. You have Him in the half second where your hands go cold, and that is not a place you have to get out of before He counts as present. Nobody has to take that from me. It is written in Psalm 46:1, and the Holy Spirit is the witness to it while your heart is still going hard under your coat.

I want to say the next thing carefully, because it is where I have watched people get hurt. I am not going to promise you the smell will stop doing this. That promise is not mine to make and Scripture does not make it, and a woman who is told her flinch will end and then meets it again in November has been handed a second wound on top of the first. What Scripture says is better than that promise and harder to hear at first: He is in it. Not after it.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.Isaiah 43:2

Read the preposition. Through. Not around. The word does not offer a route that avoids the water, it puts Somebody in the water with you. You are walking through, not standing in, and the flame does not get to kindle on a woman God is walking with. That is not a comfort I invented. It is God's own word in Isaiah 43, and the same Spirit who put it there is on the path with you in October.

Your Body Is Not Voting on Your Freedom

Now the second thing, and this is the one to carry home.

A body that remembers a fire is a body that was in one. That is all the flinch is testifying to. It is a record, and it is an accurate record, and it is not a judgment. Your body is not sitting on a jury deciding whether Christ actually set you free. It does not have that job and it was never given it. It has a much smaller job, which is to keep you alive, and nine years ago it did that job well, and it has not been told to stand down because nobody can tell it to.

Here is where the mix-up does its damage. The flinch feels like information about your soul, and it is information about your nose. You were set free by a finished work and not by a nervous system, and a cold pair of hands on a hillside has no standing to overturn it. Psalm 139 says He has beset you behind and before and laid His hand upon you, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a hand and not a phrase, including on the side of you that remembers.

And notice what God does not do in Psalm 46. He does not tell the mountains to hold still. The psalm is full of the earth being removed and the waters roaring and the hills shaking, and He does not quiet any of it before He calls Himself a refuge. He is a refuge in the noise. You have a refuge that does not require the ridge to stop sending smoke over it, and that is the only kind of refuge worth having in a county with chimneys in it. His word carries no exception for a woman whose hands go cold, and His Spirit is not standing further off on account of it.

One more thing, plainly, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If what your body is doing has gone past four seconds on a footpath, if the nights have got dark in a way you are managing on your own, 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. Walking toward help is an ordinary thing a free woman does, and there is no shame anywhere in it.