Can We Have A Word

Four words and a hand on a door frame, and she is two steps into a corridor with her coat over one arm, and her whole body has gone cold.

Half past three. The corridor has that end of day sound, doors going, a cart somewhere, somebody laughing two rooms away in a way that has nothing to do with anything. The light through the glass at the top of the stairs is doing that late afternoon thing where it comes in low and lands on the floor in a long shape.

She had her coat over her arm. She was going home. She was thinking about whether there was enough milk.

And somebody she likes, somebody perfectly decent, leans out of a doorway with one hand on the frame and says, in a completely ordinary voice:

"Can we have a word?"

That is it. Four words. There is no tone in them. The person saying them is not being ominous, is possibly about to ask about a form, and has no idea whatsoever what has just happened in the corridor.

Her stomach has gone. Her hands are cold. Somewhere in her chest something has dropped about four inches, and she is smiling, and she is saying yes of course, and she is walking toward that door.

It will almost certainly be about the form.

That is you, and your four words might be have you got a minute, or a name on a screen at a strange hour, or your manager's door being shut when it is never shut.

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 arriving 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 went cold in you in that corridor, it is not the person leaning out of the doorway. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means a decent colleague never has to be recast as a threat.

And nothing here is a ritual. There is no sequence on this page that could be got wrong, because a thing you could get wrong is no use at all in a corridor with your coat over your arm.

The psalm assumes the corridor

There is a line in a psalm that does not pretend, and the not pretending is what makes it usable.

Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive me: thou shalt stretch forth thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and thy right hand shall save me.Psalm 138:7

Though I walk in the midst of trouble.

He does not say if. He does not describe a life in which the corridor stays quiet. He assumes it, plainly, in the opening clause, and then says what is true inside it.

And be careful with the middle of that verse, because it can be misread and I am not going to misread it here. The wrath he is talking about is not a colleague with a hand on a door frame, and there is nobody on this site who is going to be handed a human being as an enemy. What the middle clause tells you is where the fighting sits. It is His hand that stretches out. It is not something the psalmist does and it is not something you do at half past three with your coat over your arm.

Then the end: thy right hand shall save me. His right hand. Already His. Already the thing that acts.

You are walking into that room with somebody's hand already stretched out over you. That is not a comfort in a corridor: Psalm 138:7 assumes the trouble and puts every acting verb on God, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an already true thing true in a body that has just gone cold rather than the amount of composure anybody can produce in four words.

Why it has to require nothing

Here is what makes this usable, and it is where most teaching on this subject falls over.

If what God gives had to be reached for at the moment of impact, it would be no use at the moment of impact. A woman two steps into a corridor cannot pray properly, cannot find a verse, cannot compose herself, cannot get somewhere quiet, and cannot run any sequence of anything, because she is smiling and saying yes of course and walking. Whatever is true has to be true without her doing a thing, or it is not for these ten seconds at all.

And that is exactly how the verse is built. The reviving is His. The stretching out is His. The right hand is His. She is the object of every verb in the sentence and the subject of none of them.

You are covered without having done anything since the words were said. The written word puts every acting verb on God inside the trouble, and His Spirit is the one holding it over a real woman in a real corridor, never a technique performed correctly under pressure.

So there is one line here, and it is not a formula and it will not fail if the words come out wrong or if only two of them arrive. His right hand is already out. Or: I walk in the midst of it and He revives me. Said out loud, quietly, walking. The words are not doing the covering. A person is noticing out loud what is already the case, and noticing has never been a spell.

You have not been left to hold your own stomach in place for the length of a corridor. Scripture assumes the trouble and hands the acting to God, and the Spirit of God has been present in every doorway you have ever been called into.