Nobody Looked Up

The clippers stopped for a moment while the barber changed the guard, and in that gap you could hear the radio, and the kettle going in the back, and six men saying nothing in particular.

Saturday, and the shop was full. Coats on the hooks by the door, a stack of magazines nobody had opened since the spring, a tin of talc on the counter with the lid off. He was third in the line, on the bench under the window, holding his phone face down on his knee. Everybody in a barbershop is pointed the same way, because that is what the room is: a long wall of mirrors and a row of men looking at themselves and at each other at the same time and pretending to do neither.

The lad in the chair, mid sentence about a match, tipped his head back an inch and asked a question out loud to nobody in the room. Something on the counter by the talc answered him. Calmly. In a pleasant voice. The barber never stopped cutting. The lad said cheers and picked his sentence up exactly where he had dropped it, and the radio carried on, and a man further down the bench turned a page.

Nobody looked up.

He looked up. He watched the whole thing happen in the mirror, which meant he watched six faces at once, and his was the only one that changed. He put his eyes back on his knee, and inside him something went very quiet, the way a house goes quiet when the boiler shuts off and you suddenly hear the silence you had been sitting in all evening.

That quiet followed him out to the pavement, and it is the reason you are still reading.

Because you were the only one in that room who flinched, and you have never told a soul, because you would not know how to begin without sounding like a man shouting at the weather. So you went home. And later, with the television on to nobody, you typed the thing you cannot say out loud into a box, and something answered you, calmly, in a pleasant voice, and you were not one inch steadier than before you asked.

And the question you typed was never the real question anyway. The real one you have never typed, because you would be ashamed to see it in your own handwriting.

Underneath, and not ahead

Let me name the weight before I say anything else, because you have carried it without a word for a long time and there is no relief in a lift that skips the pit. Scripture never once skips it either, and the Spirit is not in a hurry to get you past the true part.

It is not really the change. You have lived through changes. What has hold of you is that the ground moved and you were the only one in the room who felt it, and being the only one is its own kind of cold. And underneath that sits the sentence you have never let yourself finish, the one you would be embarrassed to hear in your own voice: is God going to be able to keep up with this.

You are not a coward for that thought and you are not a poor believer for having it. You are a person who was standing on something and felt it shift, and the Spirit is not offended by a man who noticed. Now hear what the written word actually puts under your feet.

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

Read the small word. Not ahead. The verse does not promise you a briefing, God going out in front of you with a report on the century so that you can be told what is coming and be calm because you were told. It says underneath. A refuge is a place you run to. The Spirit is the one who makes a preposition into a floor. Arms are what hold you when you cannot run anywhere at all.

And eternal is not a compliment paid to God's age, as though He were very old and therefore venerable. It means He does not stand in one century looking across at the next one and squaring His shoulders. There is no era He is catching up on, because there is no era He is inside.

And you are not being asked to understand it before you are allowed to be steady. Scripture says trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding, which makes understanding the thing you may set down rather than the price of the peace, and the Spirit is the one who steadies a person long before the explanation arrives, if it ever does.

So here is what has actually been happening to you these last months, and it is not a failure of faith, it is a category mistake made by a careful person. You have been trying to become steady by becoming informed. That is what a responsible man does. He reads. He finds out. He gets ahead of it. And it has not worked once, and you have concluded that you have not read enough yet.

You have not got a knowledge problem. You have got a footing problem, and you have been trying to solve a floor with a map.

And you are standing on something older than the change that frightened you. Deuteronomy 33:27 says the eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms, and underneath is a word about position rather than a word about information, and the Spirit is the one who makes a written line become a floor under a man's feet instead of a sentence in his head.

A map is a wonderful thing and it is not a floor. A man can hold every map ever drawn and be standing on nothing, and a man can hold none at all and be standing on rock. Reading faster has never once made anybody heavier on their feet.

And notice the second thing, because it decides whether any of this reaches you personally. Underneath is not a general statement about the universe. It is a preposition, and a preposition has a location. Underneath what. Underneath a person, which is what Scripture means by it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that specific rather than general. Underneath the bench under that window while the clippers started up again. Underneath your own front room later, with the television talking to nobody. Not underneath believers as a category, in principle, somewhere. Underneath you, in that room, at that hour, when you were the only one who looked up.

You were held while you were frightened. You did not notice, and it did not stop being true while you were not noticing.

And you were carried through months you thought you got through on your own. Isaiah 46:4 has God saying even to hoar hairs will I carry you, I have made and I will bear, and the carrying is His act rather than your achievement, and the Spirit is the one who makes a man realize he was held on a night he remembers only as fear.