There is a cake in the kitchen at the end of the floor because it is Nadia's fortieth, and somebody has written her name on the box in the wrong color, and three people are arguing pleasantly about whether the middle bit counts as a slice.
Lorraine is halfway through a sentence in an email. Her mug says World's Okayest Auditor. The printer is doing the thing it does. Somewhere behind her a phone is on speaker and a man is saying he will call them back.
Her own phone lights up, face down beside the keyboard, and she can see the glow on the desk before she can see the name, and she knows anyway.
Ten seconds. That is all this is about. What happens to a person in the ten seconds between the light on the desk and picking the thing up. The cold drop through the middle of you. The hands that stop being useful. The whole ordinary morning, the cake and the printer and the man on speaker, still going on exactly as it was, in a room that has quietly become a different room.
You have had that morning.
Maybe not with a phone. A car pulling up. A knock. A face at the door of the ward. A sentence somebody started and could not finish. And the thing nobody tells you about the ten seconds is that you spend them alone even in a room with thirty people in it, and afterwards you replay them, and somewhere in the replay you conclude that you were caught out. That it landed on you unguarded. That your faith, whatever that means at eleven twenty on a Thursday, was simply not up.
Nobody gets their guard up in ten seconds
Let me say the true thing first and let it stand on its own.
You were not caught unguarded. You did not fail to raise anything in time. In the ten seconds you are still replaying, you were not standing in the open, and His Spirit was not waiting on you to remember Him.
He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler.Psalm 91:4
Look at whose faithfulness the psalm names. Not yours. You are covered by His faithfulness, and it does not go up and down with your morning. That is written and it is not my reassurance, and the Spirit who inspired that line is the one making it true over your desk rather than the wording of it doing anything on its own.
A shield you have to raise is only ever as fast as your reflexes. A covering somebody else put up before you arrived is a different kind of object entirely. It is not waiting on you to notice it, and it does not lapse in the seconds when you are not thinking about God at all, which, in the first ten seconds, nobody is.
The armor was given, and the word attached to it is stand
There is a well known passage about armor, and I want only one thing from it here.
Read the verbs. Almost every piece in it is defensive, and the instruction repeated over it, four times in six verses, is not charge or overcome or win. It is stand. It is the posture of somebody who is already in a position that holds and is being told to stay in it.
You have been given every piece of what you are standing in, and none of it is something you assembled. The written word calls it the armor of God, His, given, and it is His Spirit who keeps you upright inside it, not the grip you have on your own faith at any given hour.
And let me be plain about something the word is plain about. Whatever came at you this morning, the fight is not against the person whose name was on the phone. Not the caller, not the one who made the decision, not the one who let you down, not the relative who said the thing. Scripture says our struggle is not against flesh and blood, and it means it, and an hour spent making a human being into the enemy is an hour spent aiming at somebody God is trying to reach.
One thing before we go on, and it matters more than the rest of the page. If what keeps arriving is a person who frightens you, standing quietly under it is not what any of this means. Tell somebody who can actually help you, today. Nothing here asks you to endure being harmed.
Nothing here is a procedure
I am not going to give you a sequence.
No words to say in an order. No steps that work if you do them right and lapse if you fumble them. The moment a covering depends on a person performing correctly, it has stopped being a covering and become a fee, and I have no authority to charge you one.
You are held by something that does not depend on your performance in the moment. His word says nothing separates you from His love, not distress and not anything present, and His Spirit is the one who holds that fast when you are not able to hold anything.
So if the day comes and you say nothing at all, if you drop the phone, if you go blank and cannot find a single sentence, nothing has failed. There is no correct version of the ten seconds.
Now, the part where something changes in your hands.
Jesus was asked about faith and did the opposite of what everybody expected. He named an amount so small it makes the question ridiculous, a seed, and by doing that He took the whole matter of quantity off the table. What He did not take off the table was the mouth. He said speak to it. Address the thing in front of you out loud, however small the faith behind the sentence feels at the time.
You have the standing to do that, because the authority is yours in Christ and was never a function of your composure. The word gives it, His Spirit carries it, and the size of the mountain is not a measurement that appears anywhere in the arrangement.
You are covered before it reaches you, and the cover was up long before the phone lit up. Psalm 91:4 says He shall cover thee with His feathers and calls His truth the shield, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an already true thing true in a body in the first ten seconds.
So the next ten seconds are not going to be spent scrambling. They are going to be spent saying one true thing out loud.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud now, standing where you are, before you need them. The covering is yours in Christ, given rather than achieved, so nothing in these lines depends on how well you hold up on the day. Scripture is the ground under them and the Holy Spirit is the life in them. And name the mountain honestly as you speak: it is not only the news, it is the belief you formed while you were replaying it, that you were caught out. Whatever He does with the rest of it, and however this unfolds, that stays with Him, and that is exactly why these are safe to say.
- Mid morning, you are not an unguarded hour and nothing reaches this desk before God does. Scripture says His faithfulness is a shield and a buckler, and the cover over me was up long before the phone ever lit.
- Fear that I cannot get my guard up in time, you are describing a job that was never mine, and I hand you over in the name of Jesus. The written word says He covers me with His pinions, and a cover I did not raise is a cover I cannot be caught without.
- Lord, You are over me this morning and I am standing rather than scrambling. I thank You, because Your faithfulness is the shield and Your Spirit is the one holding it there, and my hand is going on my chest and one true sentence is coming out of my mouth.
Psalm 91:4
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.