The Joke I Can Time to the Minute

She knows when it is coming. That is the strange part. She could set a watch by it.

Not at the door. Not over the first cup. It arrives about twenty minutes after everybody sits down, when the plates are going round and the room is loud and somebody has asked her a perfectly ordinary question about her week. And her uncle, who is not a cruel man, who drove four hours to be there, will say the line about her invisible friend, and do the little voice, and three people will laugh because they have heard it fifteen times and it is part of the furniture now.

Four seconds. Maybe six.

And she has been carrying it since Tuesday.

That is what has started to bother her more than the joke. The joke is nothing. She has known this man her whole life and he taught her to drive. What is costing her is the forty miles of motorway on the way over with her hands at ten and two, running the moment, deciding whether to laugh, deciding whether this is the year she says something, deciding how to arrange her face.

Six seconds have taken the entire drive, and by the time she walks in she is already tired.

That is your table. That is your forty miles. And I want to speak to that, because there is a psalm that puts the fear somewhere and it puts it there early.

Before it arrives

David writes this one while he is genuinely surrounded, and the order of the words is what I want you to notice.

What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.Psalm 56:3-4

What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.

He does not say when I stop being afraid. He does not wait for the feeling to clear and then act. The trusting happens inside the being afraid, at the same time, in the same hour. That is why the verse is usable on a motorway.

And look what he does with it: he puts the fear somewhere, into God's own hands, before the thing he is dreading ever arrives.

You have somewhere to put this before you get there. Not a technique for the moment itself. A place for the dread on the drive over. The written word has a man handing his fear across while it is still live, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that real in a woman doing forty miles with her hands at ten and two.

Now let me say a word about your uncle, because the drive has been quietly turning him into somebody else.

He taught you to drive. He is not mocking God; he has a bit he does, the way people who are fond of each other develop bits, and he has never once suspected it costs you a Tuesday to Saturday. He is not the opposition. He is your uncle, and if he understood he would stop.

You have nobody to defeat at that table. The written word never makes your peace depend on somebody else changing first. The Holy Spirit loves that man, and He is not asking you to arrive with a position on him.

And now the thing you have really been rehearsing, which is not the joke.

It is your own face. You have been auditioning three versions of yourself for a moment that lasts six seconds, and every one of them is exhausting, and none of them will survive contact with the actual room anyway.

You are free to arrive without a plan. I will not fear what flesh can do unto me is said about far worse than a bit at a dinner table, and it is said without a strategy attached. The Holy Spirit is not scoring your reaction, and He will be at that table whichever way your face goes.