Your Feet Stopped First

She had a position and she had held it for four years and she could state it in about two sentences.

It was not a hostile position. She had grown up in it, all of it, the whole thing: the Sunday clothes, the plate, the aunties, the hall that got hot by eleven. And then she had gone away and read and thought and come back with a considered view, and the considered view was that she loved those people and did not share the thing that held them together, and she had said so once, kindly, and never needed to say it again.

Four years of that. Steady. She was not one of those people who has to keep relitigating it.

Then in August she was walking up from the market with two bags, in the heat, thinking about absolutely nothing, and there was a man on the corner by the phone shop with a pan.

Not a busker with a case out. An old man, alone, playing for himself, badly amplified, in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.

And he was playing a hymn she had sung eight hundred times before she was fourteen.

And her feet stopped.

That is the thing she has not been able to get past. Not that she was moved, though she was, and not that her eyes went, though they did, in the street, with the bags cutting into her hands.

Her feet stopped. Before anything else happened. Before she recognized the tune, before she thought a single word about it, the body she was walking around in stopped walking and stood there on the pavement for what she thinks was about a minute, and the part of her that had a considered position did not get consulted at all.

She has been turning that over ever since. Not the tune. Not the old man. The fact that something in her answered before she did.

Strength and beauty are named in the same breath

Let me be straight with you first, because you deserve straight and there has been a great deal of the other thing.

Your four years are not being taken off you here. Nobody is about to tell you that a minute on a pavement overturns a considered position, and if that is what you are braced for you can unbrace. You thought about it seriously, which is more than many people do in either direction, and this is not a trick to walk you back.

But hear this, and take it finished rather than offered: your body was not betraying you. You are not a woman whose defenses slipped in the heat. That is not my reading of your Tuesday, it is what stands written in the ninety-sixth Psalm, where strength and beauty are named in the same breath as the two things standing in God's own house, and the same Holy Spirit who put those two words side by side is the one who was on a corner by a phone shop with an old man and a pan.

Read the pairing, because most people take the first word and leave the second.

Splendor and majesty are before Him; strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.Psalm 96:6

Strength and beauty. Not strength, with beauty allowed in on Sundays if there is room. Two loadbearing things standing together in the same house, and the psalm does not rank them and never apologizes for the second one.

So here is what that means for you, and it is yours right now rather than pending any decision you have not made: what stopped you was not the weak part of you. The word puts beauty in the sanctuary as a pillar and not a curtain, and the Spirit of God has never agreed to reach a person only through the department that had already made up its mind.

Now the part you are actually chewing on, which is the order it happened in.

You have been assuming that you are the deciding part and everything else is downstream. Head decides, body follows. And on a Tuesday in August the sequence ran backwards and it has unsettled you more than the tune did.

But that order is not in Scripture anywhere. People in the Bible get reached in their bones and their bowels and their knees constantly. A man's heart burns on a road before he works out who he has been walking with. That is not a lower way of knowing, it is how a whole person is built, and the written word says the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit, which is not a transaction that waits at the door for the mind to sign for it.

You have got a body that recognized something. That is not a fault and it is not a betrayal, and it does not, on its own, settle a single question. It just happened, and it was real, and you have been trying to file it under nothing for a fortnight.