Getting Up Stopped Feeling Like Anything

She is on the hallway floor doing the ordinary arithmetic of standing up, and there is no music, and there is no swell, and there is a wall.

Half past eleven at night in a narrow hall with the light off and the light on in the kitchen behind her so everything is shapes. A pair of shoes she did not put away. The radiator that only heats the top half.

She is not hurt. Nothing has happened in the way that word usually means. She sat down on the floor about four minutes ago because standing up in the kitchen had stopped being possible for a minute, and she came out here where nobody would come looking, and she sat with her back against the wall.

And now she is getting up.

Hand flat on the floor. Weight onto the hip. Other hand on the wall about here, where the paint has gone slightly shiny from this exact thing.

That is the part. The paint has gone shiny.

She has done this so many times that there is a mark on her own wall from it, and the mark is at the exact height of a woman's palm, and she has never once looked at it and understood what it was.

And here is what she would say if anybody asked, which nobody is going to: getting back up used to feel like something. In the first year there was a kind of defiance in it. Around the third year there was at least a sense of achievement. Now it is her hand on a shiny patch of paint at half past eleven and it feels like absolutely nothing at all, like putting a plate in a rack.

She stands. She goes and turns the kitchen light off.

That is you, and your wall might be a bathroom door, a car door, the arm of a chair, the side of a bed.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to keep getting up and taking it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

And I am not going to rally you. Being rallied is what the first year was made of and it does not work at the eleventh. I am not going to tell you it is nearly over either, because I do not know that.

The verse has a hand in it and the hand is doing the work

There is a line in a psalm about a person going down, and the second half of it names who is holding.

Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand.Psalm 37:24

Though he fall.

Not if. He is not describing somebody who does not go down. He grants the falling in the first two words and does not soften it or qualify it or attach a reason to it.

He shall not be utterly cast down. Utterly is the word carrying that clause. Not: he will not go down. He will. What is promised is not an absence of falling, it is a floor under the falling, and there is a great deal of difference between those two and only one of them is on offer anywhere in Scripture.

And then the reason, and it is not about the person at all. For the LORD upholdeth him with his hand.

Upholdeth. Present tense, continuous, going on now. Not catches, which would be an event. Holds, which is a state, and which is happening at half past eleven in a hallway whether or not it feels like anything.

You are being held up right now, and the getting up has never been the moment it happens. That is not a lift for a woman with her palm on the paint: Psalm 37:24 grants the falling and puts the upholding in the continuous present on God's side, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ongoing thing real in a body that feels nothing at all rather than the sense of achievement anybody can find in the eleventh year.

Nothing feeling like anything is not a decline

Here is what needs saying carefully, because she has drawn a conclusion about herself and it is the wrong one.

In the first year the getting up felt like defiance. In the third it felt like an achievement. Now it feels like putting a plate in a rack.

She has read that as a graph going down. Defiance, achievement, nothing: three points on a line, and the line is her.

But look at what has actually changed. Not the getting up. She still does it, at half past eleven, on her own, with nobody watching, on a night when nobody would know if she did not.

What has changed is the feeling attached to it. And a feeling attached to an action is not the action, and it fades on absolutely everything a human being does often enough. Nobody feels anything about their own competence at driving. That is not a decline in driving.

You have not declined, and the thing that thinned out was never the getting up. The written word grants the falling and puts the upholding in the continuous present, and the Spirit of God has been the hand under every one of them, never the feeling anybody has about it by the eleventh year.

And nobody is asking you for one more push. The instruction attached to the whole armor is stand, four times in six verses and no fifth verb, and a hand on a shiny patch of paint at half past eleven is that verb with no audience.

You are standing, and standing was always the assignment. Scripture calls a person who is on their feet at the end of it standing, and His Spirit is what has had a woman up off a hallway floor more times than either of you have counted.