The Same Line On The Bench

He has read the same line for nine hours and the paper has gone soft where his thumb sits.

The bench outside the ward, the one bolted along the wall with the arm halfway that stops anybody lying down on it. The machines make their sounds somewhere down the hall and there is a rhythm to it that he stopped noticing about four hours ago. A cleaner has been past twice. A woman opposite has been asleep sitting up since seven and her coat has slid off her knees and neither of them is going to mention it.

In his hand is a piece of paper folded into eighths. His sister wrote it out for him at some point, in a hurry, in the corridor, and it has one line on it.

He has read it, he would guess, two hundred times.

Not devotionally. Not in the way anybody means when they talk about meditating on something. He reads it the way a man in a small boat looks at a compass, which is not admiringly, and not often for very long, and constantly.

Because here is the thing about the last nine hours, and he could not have predicted it: everything else in this building is an opinion.

The consultant's face, which he has been reading like a text. The tone of the nurse who came out at four, which he has decided means one thing and then the other thing about six times. What his sister thinks. What he thinks. His own sense, which arrives every twenty minutes with total conviction and then turns over.

Every single thing available to him is a reading. Except this one piece of paper, which says what it said at eleven this morning and will say the same thing at four tomorrow.

He unfolds it again.

That is you, and your bench might be a waiting area, a kitchen at three, a car outside a building you have to go back into.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to sit there and absorb it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Not anybody in this building, all of whom are doing their jobs and most of whom are doing them well. 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.

The psalm says where the hoping is put

There is a very short psalm out of the deep, and one line of it is a man saying exactly where he has placed a thing.

I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.Psalm 130:5

In his word do I hope.

Notice that he does not say what he hopes for. He does not name an outcome. There is no clause in that verse about what he expects to happen, and in a psalm written by somebody in serious trouble that absence is not an oversight.

He names the place he has put the hoping. Not in his own read of the situation, not in how the day is going, not in the faces of the people coming and going. In the word.

And that is precisely the distinction a man on a bench has arrived at by accident after nine hours. He has worked out, without any theology at all, that everything in that corridor is a reading and one thing is not, and he has been holding on to the one thing because it is the only object in the building with a fixed value.

You are hoping in something that says the same thing whatever the corridor is doing. That is not a comfort at the ninth hour: Psalm 130:5 places the hope in the word rather than in an outcome, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a fixed thing hold under a man reading faces all day rather than the steadiness anybody can manage outside a ward.

Your reading of the corridor is not a lie

Now the part that has to be said carefully, because this is where people get hurt.

Nothing here is telling him that his readings are wrong. Some of them are probably right. He may well be reading that consultant's face accurately; people who love somebody in a ward often read a room better than the room knows.

And nothing here is telling him to stop noticing. He should notice. Ask the questions. Say the thing to the doctor. Be there when they do the rounds. All of that is good and none of it is a failure of trust, and the people in that building are worth listening to.

What has gone wrong is only this: he has been standing on the readings. And a reading that turns over every twenty minutes will take a person with it every twenty minutes, and after nine hours of that a man is not tired from the situation, he is tired from being moved.

You have been standing on something designed to change and it moved exactly as much as it was built to. The written word puts the hoping in itself rather than in an outcome, and the Spirit of God is the one holding a man steady on a bolted bench, never the accuracy of anybody's read of a corridor.

There is no key on this page and no method. Nothing here is a technique, because a technique can be done badly and the failing of it would land on you at hour ten.