Nothing Here Is Answering to Me

The bus stopped nine kilometers short of anywhere, on the high road, at about half past four in the morning.

The driver got out with a torch in his mouth, opened a panel at the back, looked at it for a long time, and then closed the panel and stood with his hands on his hips in exactly the way a man stands when he has just found out that this is not a thing he can fix.

The man in seat six was up immediately. He had opinions. He had once had a cousin with a workshop. He went out into the cold in his shirt and looked at the same panel and asked questions and then came back in and rang three people who could not help him and told the whole bus what each of them had said.

A young couple started working out how far they could walk. Somebody wanted the luggage compartment opened. Somebody else was already on the phone to a brother two hundred kilometers away, who could do nothing at all except be awake.

And near the back, in the dark, an old woman had her bag on her knees and her hands on her bag and she was singing. Not loudly. Just to herself, the way you hum when you are peeling something.

After a while the man in seat six could not stand it any more. He turned round and said, with real irritation, "How can you sit there like that."

And she said, "I have been on this road for forty years, my love. They know we are here. There is always another bus."

She was not being brave and she was not pretending. She was in possession of a piece of information about who was awake somewhere else, and everything about how she was sitting came out of that one fact.

The triangle still got put out on the road behind them. She helped with that. She just did not carry the mountain.

Somebody is awake somewhere else

Let me name what your month has actually been like, because people ask how you are and you say fine and then you go back to it.

You have rung the number and been on hold and been cut off and rung again. You have filled the form in twice because the first one was the old version. You have written the careful email that got a reply from an address that does not accept replies. You have been polite to somebody who has no power to help you and then sat in the car afterwards.

And here is the part that is doing the actual damage, and it is not the waiting. It is that you have discovered your effort no longer converts into anything. You push and nothing moves. That breaks something in a person much faster than bad news does, because a human being can carry an enormous amount as long as the pushing still works.

So you are tired in a way sleep does not touch, and some time in the last few weeks you started behaving as though the whole thing is being held up by your vigilance. As though if you stopped checking, it would fall.

Now hear where this next sentence comes from, because it changes how it lands. This was not written by somebody comfortable, and it was carried hardest by people with no political power whatsoever, people who could be evicted, silenced or worse by anybody who chose to, and who found in it the only ground they had.

The Lord has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all.Psalm 103:19

Established. Not being defended. Not currently contested. Established, past tense, finished work, sitting there while your phone battery dies in a queue.

That is not a philosophical point. It is the old woman's forty years on the road. Somebody is awake somewhere else, and the situation you are stuck in is not off the map, is not unnoticed, and is not being held together by your attention.

And now the two things this is not, because both of them do real harm and I would rather say them plainly than let you assume them.

It is not fatalism. Nothing in this asks you to stop. Put the triangle out. Ring again on Monday. Fill in the form, take the advice, keep the appointment, do the next sensible thing in front of you. She helped with the triangle. The difference between her and the man in seat six was never how much they did. It was what they thought was resting on it.

And it is not an explanation. I am not going to tell you why the particular hard thing in your life happened, and anybody who does that to you with this verse in their hand has taken a comfort and turned it into a blunt instrument. The throne is not an explanation service. It is a fact about who is governing while you do not understand, and those are two completely different gifts.

You are not the government of your own life. You have been acting as prime minister for about six weeks now, unelected, unqualified, unpaid, in a role that was never yours, and the relief available to you tonight is not that the situation resolves. It is that you can put the seals of office down and still be perfectly safe.

So hear this said over you, on hold again with a reference number on the back of an envelope. You are not the one holding this together and you were never given that job, and the throne this system has been ignoring has been occupied through every week of it. That is written into a psalm that says His sovereignty rules over all, and it is the Holy Spirit who intercedes for you with groanings too deep for words while you are still in the queue.