Refreshing At Six In The Morning

The kettle has not boiled and she has already pulled the page down four times.

Six in the morning in a kitchen that is still mostly dark, one light on over the stove because the big light is too much at this hour. The heating has just come on and the pipe behind the cupboard is making the noise it makes. Somewhere upstairs a child turns over and does not wake.

She is standing at the counter in a hoodie over pajamas with her thumb on the screen. The portal takes a second to load. She pulls it down. Nothing new. She pulls it down again anyway, because the first time might not have counted.

Eleven weeks of this.

Not every day at first. It became every day in about week three. Now it is the first thing, before the kettle, before the curtains, before she has properly located herself in the day, and she does it standing up in the dark with the cold coming off the floor through her socks.

If you asked her, she would say she wants to know as soon as there is anything to know. That is true. It is also not the whole thing.

The whole thing, which she has never said to her husband and would find hard to say to a doctor, is that some part of her believes that watching it is what keeps it from being bad. That the news cannot arrive while she is looking. That eleven weeks of vigilance is a kind of holding, and if she stopped holding, the thing she is afraid of would be free to happen.

She knows how that sounds. She has an education. It does not help at six in the morning.

The kettle clicks. She puts the phone face down and does not turn it back over for four minutes, which is the longest stretch since Tuesday.

That is you, and your portal might be a phone, or a location on a map, or a door you check, or a name you say to God in the same order every night because the one night you skipped a name you could not settle.

Two plain things before anything else. If your version of this includes somebody frightening you or hurting you, nothing on this page is telling you to stand there and take it; tell one person today who can act, your doctor, a crisis line where you live, one friend who will come. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Not the ones who have not called. Not anybody in a hospital. 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.

Moses says it in eight words

There is a sentence Moses says to people who are looking at something that frightens them, and it is short enough to hold at six in the morning.

Ye shall not fear them: for the LORD your God he shall fight for you.Deuteronomy 3:22

He shall fight for you.

Not: He will help you fight. Not: He will strengthen you for the fight, which is the version most of us were handed and which leaves the whole weight in the same hands it was already in. He shall fight. The verb has one subject and it is not the woman at the counter.

Which means the watching has never been part of the mechanism. It is not doing anything. That is not an insult to eleven weeks of it, and it is not a criticism of a frightened woman standing in the dark. It is a relief, if it can be got all the way in: the outcome was never resting on whether her thumb was on the screen at the right moment.

You have not been keeping this at bay, and it was never held off by your attention. That is not a comfortable line to hand somebody in week eleven: Deuteronomy 3:22 makes God the one who fights and the people the ones who do not fear, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a released thing stay released in a body that has been braced since April rather than the amount of watchfulness anybody can keep up before dawn.

And be careful with the first half, because it can be misread into a burden. Ye shall not fear them is not an instruction to feel differently by an act of will, and nobody is being told off for being afraid at six in the morning. It is the consequence of the second half, not the price of it. The reason not to fear is the fighting, and the fighting is His.

Setting the phone down is not the same as not caring

Here is the fear underneath the fear, and it should be said plainly.

The fear is that stopping the watching means letting go of the person. That the day she does not refresh is the day she gets caught not caring, and that if something bad ever did come, she would know that she had eased off just before it.

That is not how any of this works, and Scripture never once treats it that way.

Handing a thing back to God is not indifference to it. She does not stop being a wife, a mother, a woman who wants an answer, on the morning she leaves the phone face down. She stops being the guarantor of the result, which is a post nobody appointed her to, that she took on in week three out of love and fear together, and that she has held without relief ever since.

You were never the last thing standing between the people you love and bad news, and God did not put you in that position. The written word says the Lord your God shall fight for you, and the Spirit of God is the one carrying what a person is not built to carry, never the person's stamina.

And let me be exact about the thing that matters most on this page, because somebody has been quietly carrying it for weeks. Whatever that portal eventually says, it will not be a report on how well you watched, how hard you prayed, or how much faith you managed to hold on to in the dark. Nobody buys an outcome with vigilance and nobody forfeits one by sleeping through. That arithmetic does not exist anywhere in Scripture, and where it has been implied to you it was implied wrongly.

You have not been sitting an examination that God has been marking since April. The word puts the fighting on Him in a sentence with no conditions attached, and His Spirit has been holding this household through every one of the eleven weeks.

By the way: keep the appointments. Ask the doctor the questions. Say the thing you have not said to your husband. None of that is a failure of trust; it is what trusting people do while God does the fighting, and He has never once asked anybody to choose between the two.