Two Evacuations And School On Time

Two bags stood by the door from June until the middle of September.

The first time they went at four in the afternoon with an hour's notice and came back after nine days to a house that was fine and a smell that was in everything they owned for a month. The second time they went at two in the morning and she does not remember packing, and she found her daughter's inhaler in her own coat pocket a week later, which means she must have.

And on the third of September both children walked into school with their names on their bags and their shoes on the right feet.

Her sister in law said, at the barbecue afterward, you are unbelievable, honestly, most people would have fallen apart. Somebody agreed. Somebody said it must be all that mountain air.

She smiled. And then she stood at the sink for a while with the water running.

Because here is what she has not told anybody. She has almost no memory of August. And getting two children to school in September is not, in her account of things, evidence of a strength she has. It is evidence of something she cannot name, operating in a woman who was not really there.

You have a summer like that. Or a winter. Some stretch you came out of intact in ways you cannot account for, with a room full of people who have already decided what it says about you.

Name what the smoke took, before anybody names anything else

Nobody at that barbecue counted it, so we will.

It took the summer. Not metaphorically: the actual summer, the camping trip, the two weeks at her mother's, the thing her son had been talking about since March. It took her ability to be in a room with a window open without checking the sky. It took her daughter's sleep, which is the one she cannot think about for long.

And it took the ordinary right to be tired in front of her own family, because she has been the one holding the bags by the door and a person holding the bags does not get to sit down.

You have been carrying a whole season in a body that never got to put it down, and God has never once weighed the cost against what you managed. Psalm 34:18 says He is near to the broken hearted, and the same Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it beside a woman standing at a sink with the water running. He was not out at the barbecue admiring the school bags. He was at the sink.

Through, and the through is the whole word

There is one line built for a woman with two bags by a door.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you: when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned.Isaiah 43:2

Read the preposition three times, because it is the same word each time. Through. Not around, and not instead of. The passage does not promise there will be no water and no fire; it says exactly the opposite, plainly, three times, and then puts a Person in the middle of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about an actual August rather than a comfort about hardship in general.

You were walked through it rather than kept out of it, and the walking through was never something you did on your own legs. That is not a lovely reading of a famous verse. The written word grants the water and grants the fire and puts the I will be with you in the middle, and the Spirit is the one who was in a car at two in the morning with an inhaler that ended up in a coat pocket. The barbecue said unbelievable. Isaiah never says unbelievable about the person walking.

And this needs saying plainly. Two evacuations are not a display. They were not arranged so that a family could learn something by watching a mother cope. God did not put fire on a hillside to make a point at a barbecue. Nobody in that house is an exhibit and nobody ever was.

Two things a woman with no August has to hear

The first is that God still goes with people. Not went, poetically, in an older world. Goes, present tense, at two in the morning, on the road out.

The second is that His going with was not a response to how well she packed. She did not pack. Something packed, and she found the evidence in a pocket a week later.

You were accompanied through a summer you were barely present for, and the accompanying was given rather than earned. Deuteronomy 31:8 says He goes before you and will not fail you nor forsake you, and it is His Spirit who makes goes before into a real position on an actual road.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the checking of the sky has gone somewhere heavier, if there are hours when carrying on is genuinely a question, or if your daughter is not sleeping and it is frightening you, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line first. That is not the accompanying failing. That is the accompanying arriving with hands and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.