The Post I Never Left

Mairi worked out the shape of it at a wedding in Inverness, of all places, and she has not been able to unsee it since.

She was there for two nights. That is longer than she goes, and she knew it was longer, and she had been slightly braced about it for a fortnight without ever putting a reason to the bracing.

And on the Saturday night, at about midnight, sitting in a hotel corridor because the room was too warm, she suddenly saw eleven years laid out like a map.

She has not gone anywhere for more than two nights since 2015.

She has said no to a job that would have been good. She has turned down two invitations to go with people she loves to places she genuinely wants to see. She has a reason for every single one and every reason is true and none of them is the reason.

The reason is that she has to be near enough.

Near enough to what, she could not have said before that corridor. There is nothing physically located anywhere. The thing that happened, happened in 2014 and it is over and there is nobody to check on.

But something in her has been standing at a post since then, and the post has a radius, and the radius is about two nights.

She is not afraid it will come back. She would say, honestly, that she does not think it can. She simply has not stood down, and eleven years of not standing down has quietly drawn the boundary of a life.

You may know that map.

Maybe yours is not distance. Maybe it is a thing you never do, or a kind of person you do not get close to, or a conversation you have never once allowed to start. And there is a good reason for each individual instance.

Nobody is asking you to be careless

Let me say this properly because it matters more here than anywhere.

I am not telling you to dismantle your arrangements. Some of what you have built is wisdom. Some things genuinely should be kept in place, permanently, and only you and the people who know your life can say which.

I am not telling you the thing was not serious. It was. You have arranged eleven years around it, which is what people do about serious things, and I am not going to talk about it as though it were small.

And I am not telling you that standing down is a test of faith you are currently failing. It is not a test and you are not failing anything.

What I want to look at is the post, and specifically who put you on it.

Who is doing the keeping

There is a line in Isaiah, in the middle of a song about a city that is being kept safe, and the mechanism it describes is not the reader's alertness.

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.Isaiah 26:3

Thou wilt keep.

The keeping is His verb. And the condition attached is not vigilance; it is where the mind is resting, which is almost the opposite of vigilance, because a mind that is stayed is a mind that has settled somewhere rather than a mind that is scanning.

And the phrase in the original is doubled: peace, peace. It is emphatic. Not a manageable amount of peace for somebody at a post. The whole thing.

And the keeping was assigned to Him and not to you. The written word makes thou wilt keep the mechanism and a settled mind the condition, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman sitting in a hotel corridor at midnight.

And you are not the guard on this. The word says he that keepeth thee will not slumber, and it puts a keeper in place who does not need relieving, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring a patrol.

The radius, and what it has cost

Now let me count the price with you, gently, because you started counting in that corridor and stopped.

A job you would have been good at. Two trips with people you love. And, underneath the countable things, eleven years of a low continuous readiness that has never once been called upon.

That readiness is not free. It runs in the background of everything and it is why you are tired in a way that a holiday does not fix, except you have not had the kind of holiday that would test that.

I am not going to tell you to book something. That would be a stranger rearranging your life from a distance.

I am asking whether the post was ever a post, or whether you simply never received the order to stand down and have been holding the line out of duty since 2015.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has just seen eleven years laid out and felt something like shame about it.

And He has never once needed you at that post. The word says except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a rebuke to somebody who has been waking.