It Rang Twice On The Ladder

It goes twice in his pocket and stops, and he is six feet up with a brush in one hand, and there is no version of this where he gets to it in time.

Half past ten on a bright morning. A wall the color of milky tea that is turning, slowly, into a wall the color of cream. A radio somewhere down the street playing to a garden nobody is in. The ladder is set right, feet on the flags, one rung of give at the top the way there always is.

Twice. Then nothing.

Nobody rings twice at half past ten. People text. People ring once and leave it. A phone that goes twice at half past ten on a working morning is somebody trying, and stopping, and thinking about whether to try again.

He puts the brush across the top of the can. He wipes his hand on his leg out of habit, which is pointless. And then he comes down, one rung at a time, because a man does not hurry on a ladder and because he has known men who did.

Eleven rungs. He counts them without meaning to.

And in those eleven rungs, which take about fourteen seconds, the entire thing has already happened inside him. He has assembled a list of who it might be. He has worked out which of them would ring twice. He has decided which of two possible pieces of news it is, and then decided it is the other one, and then landed on the flags with his heart going and his hand in his pocket.

That is you, and your ladder might be a school run you are mid way through, a meeting you cannot leave, a train in a tunnel, a shower you have shampoo in your hair in.

Before anything else. Nothing on this page is medical advice, and nothing here is going to tell you that what your body does in fourteen seconds is a spiritual condition. That is not mine to say and it would not be true. If moments like this have been arriving often, or if any of 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 on a step with you. And whatever is on the other end of that phone, what you are actually up against is not a person. Not the one ringing and not the one being rung about. Scripture says 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 you could get wrong, because a thing that can be got wrong is no use at all to a man eleven rungs up.

He says it in the past tense, and the tense is the point

There is a line where David reaches for a picture, and the grammar of it is what makes it usable at the top of a ladder.

For thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy.Psalm 61:3

Thou hast been.

Not thou wilt be. Not be a shelter for me now. He is looking backward, at what has already been the case, and he is doing it in the middle of a psalm where he is a long way from home and his heart is, in his own words, overwhelmed.

That is a man in trouble reaching for evidence rather than for a promise. And there is a reason that is stronger, not weaker: a promise still has to arrive, and evidence is already here.

A strong tower. Note what a tower does and does not do. A tower does not remove the thing that is out there. It is high, and thick, and it is where you already are, and its whole function is that it does not have to be built when the thing appears.

You are standing in something that has already been a shelter, over and over, for years. That is not a comfort at the top of a ladder: Psalm 61:3 puts the shelter in the completed tense and reaches for what is already established rather than what might come, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an established thing hold in a body coming down eleven rungs rather than the amount of calm anybody can find in fourteen seconds.

Fourteen seconds, and nothing to do in them

Here is what makes this usable, and it is where most of what gets said about this falls over.

The fourteen seconds are not a decision point. Nobody makes a choice on a ladder. A man comes down carefully because his hands know how, and everything else that happens in him happens without his permission: the list, the arithmetic, the two pieces of news, the landing on the flags with his heart going.

So whatever is true has to have been true at rung eleven, before any of that started, or it is not for the fourteen seconds at all.

And that is exactly the shape of the psalm. Thou hast been. Past tense, established, already the case at rung eleven and at rung one and on every morning before this one. There is nothing in that clause the man has to do and nothing he could do incorrectly.

You are sheltered without having done anything since it rang the second time. The written word puts the shelter in the completed tense, and His Spirit is the one holding it around a real man on a real ladder, 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 only half of it arrives. Thou hast been a shelter. Or: He has been a tower before this. Said out loud, on the way down, to a wall. The words are not doing the sheltering. Somebody is noticing out loud what has already been true a long time.

You have never once had to reach a tower you were already inside. Scripture reaches backward for what has been, and the Spirit of God has been the thing that was already there in every fourteen seconds of your life.