Aisle Seven, No Warning

Three bars in and he is standing completely still beside the canned tomatoes with a basket in his hand.

Aisle seven, half past four, the light in a supermarket which is not light so much as an absence of shadow. Somebody's cart has a wheel doing the thing wheels do. A man in a fleece is comparing two identical jars with real attention. The air has that faint cold coming off the chiller cabinets at the far end.

And the ceiling starts playing a song.

Not a significant song. Not one that was ever theirs, not one anybody would put in a story. A song that was simply on, a great deal, in a particular eighteen months, in a car, on a road, when everything was still fine and nobody knew what was coming.

Three bars. That is all it takes. Less time than it takes to read this sentence.

He does not go anywhere. He is a grown man in a supermarket and he is not going to make a scene beside the tomatoes, and there is not going to be a scene, because this is not that. This is a floor opening quietly under one person in the middle of an ordinary afternoon while a man in a fleece compares jars.

His hand tightens on the basket handle. That is the only external event.

The song will run for another two and a half minutes and he will be out of the shop before it finishes.

That is you, and your aisle seven might be a smell in a corridor, a name coming up in someone else's conversation, a date on a form, the second verse of something at a wedding.

Before anything else. Nothing on this page is medical advice, and nothing here is going to tell you that what your body does in those ten seconds is a spiritual condition. That is not mine to say and it would not be true. If this has been happening often, or if it has taken you somewhere darker, tell one person today who can act: your doctor, a crisis line where you live, one friend who will come and sit down. And whatever opened the floor in that aisle, it is not a person. Not whoever chose the playlist, not the one you lost, not yourself. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality.

And nothing here is a ritual. There is no sequence on this page that could be got wrong, because a thing that can be got wrong is no use at all to somebody standing beside the tomatoes.

Four words that were written for a corridor

There is a line everybody half knows, and the part that does the work in aisle seven is the four words at the end that most people drop.

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

A very present help.

Present is a word about location. It means here, at this spot, without travel. And the very is not decoration; in older English it means true, actual, genuine. A genuinely present help. Not a help that is on its way. Not a help that could be summoned by somebody with the right words. One that is at the location already.

And in trouble is the last phrase for a reason. Not before it. Not after, when everything has been thought through. In it. Inside the three bars.

Which means the timing works. That is not a small thing. Most of what we are handed for hard moments is designed for after the moment, and is therefore useless during it, and a person standing beside the tomatoes needs something that was true at bar one.

You are not being helped from somewhere else, and He was in aisle seven before the song started. That is not a comfort for a man with a basket: Psalm 46:1 puts the help at the location and inside the trouble, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a present thing present in a body with a floor opening under it rather than the amount of steadiness anybody can find in three bars.

Nothing to perform, and no way to do it wrong

Here is what makes this usable at half past four, and it is where most teaching on this subject fails.

If the help required a performance, it would not be help. A man in free fall in a supermarket cannot pray properly. He cannot compose himself. He cannot recall a passage, get somewhere quiet, or run a sequence of any kind. Whatever is true has to have been true before he noticed, or it is not for the ten seconds at all.

And that is precisely the shape of the verse. God is refuge. Present tense, stated as a fact about Him rather than a state achieved by anybody. The reader is not the subject of a single verb in that sentence.

You are covered without having done anything at all since the music started. The written word states the presence as a fact about God, and His Spirit is the one making it hold on a real person in a real aisle, never a technique performed correctly under pressure.

So there is one line here, and it is not a formula and it does not fail if the words come out wrong, because the words are not what is working. Something true, said out loud, quietly, in an aisle: He is here. Or: a very present help. Or four words of the verse in whatever order they arrive. None of it is doing the covering. It is a person noticing out loud what is already the case, and noticing is not a spell.

You have never once had to hold yourself up in those ten seconds. Scripture says the help is present and inside the trouble, and the Spirit of God has been at the location every single time the floor has opened under you.