Two Minutes Before I Was Due

The phone is tilted away from everybody and she has read it twice, and somebody is walking toward her with a microphone.

Two minutes. She is on the side chair, the one they always put out, next to a small table with a bottle of water on it that she will not drink and a folded piece of paper she does not need. The room on the other side of the doors is full and warm and you can hear it, that particular noise a lot of people make when they are pleased to be somewhere.

Somebody's child runs past and is retrieved.

She looked at the screen because she had two minutes and because looking at a screen is what a person does with two minutes. And it was there, and it is not something she can unread, and it will still be there afterward, and it is going to change some things.

Her thumb is on the edge of the case. She has not moved otherwise.

And here is the impossible part of this particular ten seconds, and it is worth naming because it is what makes this different from other kinds of hit: she does not get to have it. There is no version of the next two minutes in which she goes and stands somewhere and lets her face do what it wants to do. She is going to stand up, and she is going to be steady, and it will not be a performance exactly, because she genuinely will mean what she says out there.

The person with the microphone is smiling and holding it out.

She turns the phone face down on the little table and stands up.

That is you, and your two minutes might be before a shift, before a class, before walking into your own kitchen where the children are, before picking up a phone to somebody who cannot know yet.

Before anything else. Nothing on this page is medical advice, and nothing here is going to tell you that what your body does in those ten seconds is a spiritual condition. That is not mine to say and it would not be true. If this has been arriving often, or if 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 down. And whatever is on that screen, what you are up against is not the person who sent it. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because in two minutes you are going to be looking at a room full of faces.

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 to anybody with two minutes and a microphone coming toward them.

David asks for a place, not for an exemption

There is a line in a psalm about being hidden, and the geography of it is what makes it work for somebody who cannot leave the room.

For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock.Psalm 27:5

In the time of trouble. Again the assumption. Not if. The verse is written for the hour it is written for.

He shall hide me in his pavilion. A pavilion is a covered place inside a larger space. It is a shelter with a room around it. That is worth sitting with, because the hiding described here is not the same as leaving.

And then: in the secret of his tabernacle. Secret, meaning hidden from view, meaning nobody else present can see it. And then the third thing, which is not hiding at all: he shall set me up upon a rock, which is height and visibility and standing.

Hidden and set up. In the same verse, in the same breath. Which is precisely the position of a woman about to walk out in front of four hundred people two minutes after reading something.

You are hidden and standing at the same time, and both of those are His doing. That is not a comfort on a side chair: Psalm 27:5 puts the hiding and the setting up in one sentence and makes God the subject of both, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a hidden place hold inside a full room rather than the amount of composure anybody can assemble in two minutes.

Nothing to run, and nowhere to go

Here is what makes this usable, and it is where a great deal of teaching on this subject fails completely.

Most of what gets offered for a hard moment assumes you can leave it. Go somewhere quiet. Take a minute. Sit with it. All of that is good and none of it is available to a person with a microphone being held out.

So whatever is true has to be portable, and it has to require nothing, and it has to work standing up in front of people. Otherwise it is not for the ten seconds and we should stop pretending it is.

And that is exactly the shape of the verse. He hides. He sets up. There is not one instruction in it, and the person being hidden does not have to find the pavilion, because a pavilion you have to find is no use in a room you cannot leave.

You are covered without having done anything since you read it. The written word makes the hiding and the standing both His acts, and His Spirit is the one holding them in a real woman in a real hall, 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 it comes out in the wrong order. I am hidden in this room. Or: He has set me up on a rock. Said quietly, once, sitting down, with a microphone coming toward you. The words are not doing the covering. Somebody is noticing out loud what is already the case.

You have never once had to be ready in order to be covered. Scripture hides and sets up in one sentence, and the Spirit of God has done both in every room you have had to walk into holding something nobody there knew about.