I Flinch When It Arrives

Mairi noticed it about a year ago and it has changed something she cannot get back.

It used to be the best thing that happened to her. The settledness would begin to come, usually about something she was praying for, and there would be a lift in her chest, and she would recognize it and be glad and go with it.

Now there is a half second before the gladness that was not there before, and in that half second she braces.

Not against God. She wants that said, and it is important, because she is not angry and this is not a crisis of anything. The bracing is against what comes afterwards. Because she has now had it enough times to know the shape: it arrives, it holds, and then at some point over days or weeks it recedes, and the receding is a particular kind of bleakness that she cannot describe to anybody and has never tried.

So the flinch is not about the arrival. It is anticipatory grief about the departure, and it arrives first, and it has started to spoil the thing itself.

She is forty-four.

And what she has begun to notice more recently, which is worse, is that she has been slightly avoiding the situations where it tends to come. Not deliberately. She has just been less inclined to sit with a thing at length, which is exactly where it used to arrive.

You may know that half second.

Maybe you have also started to brace. Maybe you also cannot say it to anybody, because I have begun to dread the good thing is not a sentence with an obvious listener.

What was not given

There is a sentence in Paul's last letter, written to a man who was by every indication frightened, and the structure of it is a contrast rather than a command.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.2 Timothy 1:7

Hath not given.

It is about origin rather than about behavior. Paul does not tell Timothy to stop being afraid; he tells him where the fear did not come from, which is a different kind of help entirely, and considerably more useful to somebody who has already tried not being afraid.

Read what that does to your half second.

The bracing is not something you were given. It is something you learned, from repetition, and it is exactly what a nervous system does when a good thing has reliably been followed by a bad one. It is not faithlessness and it is not a spiritual condition; it is a conditioned response, and the verse locates it outside the list of things handed to you.

And the flinch was not given to you and it is not part of what you carry. The written word tells a frightened man where the fear did not originate rather than instructing him to stop, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has begun to dread the good thing.

And you are not required to stop flinching before the thing can come. The word names what was given rather than setting a condition, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring you to be unafraid first.

The going is not the same as loss

Now let me touch the receding, because that is the actual injury and nobody has ever named it for you.

The bleakness when it goes is real and it is specific and it is not what people mean when they talk about dry seasons. It is the particular flatness of having had a thing that is not there any more, and it is worse than never having had it, and that is why you brace.

But look at what you have been calling it.

You have been experiencing the departure as a loss, as though something was taken. And a thing that was given for a moment and then completes is not taken, in the same way that a person who lends you a coat on a cold night and takes it back when you get indoors has not robbed you.

That distinction sounds like a technicality until you notice what your body does with each. A loss is grieved and braced against. A completion is not.

I am not going to tell you the bleakness will stop, because I do not know and it may not. What I am telling you is that some of its weight is coming from a reading, and the reading is that something was removed from you, and the text does not describe it that way anywhere.

And its going is not your collapse and it is not a removal. The word makes it given for occasions rather than issued as a possession, and the Spirit is the one who makes the difference between a completion and a theft real rather than semantic.

And nothing about you is under review for a conditioned response. The word says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman whose body has learned something reasonable from repetition.

What the avoiding is costing

One more, plainly, because you noticed it yourself and then moved past it quickly.

You have been sitting with things less.

That is the expensive part. Not the flinch, which is only a half second and which you can live alongside. The avoidance is quiet and it is cumulative and it removes you from exactly the places where the thing has always come, and it will do that regardless of whether you ever resolve any of this.

And you are able to sit with something without bracing for its ending. The word says be careful for nothing, but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God, and the Spirit is the one who supplies a way of being present that does not require a guarantee about later.