He Is Able to Keep What I Handed Him

He was nine and it was somebody's basement and there was a projector that made a noise like a fan.

The film was about people disappearing. Cars going off roads with nobody in them, a kettle boiling in an empty kitchen, and a girl about his age standing in a doorway calling for her mother. He remembers the doorway more clearly than he remembers most of his actual childhood.

Afterward the man running it said some things about being ready, and everybody prayed, and then there was orange squash and a biscuit and they all went home, and nobody ever mentioned it again.

He is thirty nine now. He is not frightened of that film and he could not tell you its name.

What he has instead is something he has never put a word to until recently. A brace. A low, constant, background readiness, like the way you hold your body on ice. It is not panic and it does not stop him doing anything. It shows up as a particular sensation when he comes home and the house is too quiet, and as a habit of counting who is where, and as a thing that happens in his chest for about a second when somebody does not answer a call.

He has been a believer his whole adult life. He can explain, correctly and at length, why that brace is not a rational response to anything he actually believes.

It has made no difference at all, and that is the part he finds humiliating, and it is why he has never told his wife.

Sit down here. That brace has never been examined by anybody, and there is a sentence that goes underneath it.

Somebody else is doing the guarding

Here is Paul, in prison, at the end of his life, writing to a frightened younger man.

But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me.2 Timothy 1:12

Read what he says he is sure about. Not himself. Not his stamina, not his record, not his ability to hold on through what was coming. He says: I know whom I have believed, and He is able to guard it.

The verb is guard, and it is being done by somebody else, to something that was handed over.

You are not the guard on this. 2 Timothy 1:12 puts the keeping in Christ's hands and describes it as something He is able to do, and the Spirit inspired that sentence through a man who had every reason to be braced and was not.

And note where Paul was when he wrote it. Not comfortable. Not safe. Chained, near the end, with people who had left him. The confidence in that verse is not the product of a settled life; it is the product of having handed something over to Somebody able to hold it.

Why the explanation never worked

Now the humiliating part, which is not humiliating at all once it is understood.

The explanation has been run dozens of times, correctly, and it has changed nothing, and the conclusion drawn from that is that something in you is broken or that the faith is not going in far enough.

Neither is true. What happened is that the brace was installed at nine, by an image, in a room, at an age when a person does not process things by argument. It went into a different system from the one that has been getting addressed.

Argument does not reach it, because argument is not how it got there. That is a fact about how people are made rather than a report on your faith.

You are not failing at believing this. Nothing written anywhere makes the absence of an old fear the measure of anything, and the Spirit is not standing behind that brace waiting for you to think your way out of it.

What to do with something installed at nine

Here is the practical part, and it is not a technique for removing the sensation.

Things that went in as images do not usually come out as arguments. They tend to be answered by other images, and by words said out loud rather than thought, and by time.

So say it out loud. Not the explanation. The handover. I have handed this to Him and He is able to guard it. Out loud, in your own voice, particularly at the moment when the house is too quiet and the sensation arrives.

That is not positive thinking and it is not a charm. It is putting a sentence into the same channel the fear uses, which is the ear and the body rather than the reasoning part.

You have something to say into that second in your chest. It stands written that He is able to guard what was entrusted to Him, the Spirit carries what He inspired, and the sentence does not stop being true on the occasions when it does not immediately work.

And tell your wife. Not because she can fix it. Because a thing carried alone for thirty years gets heavier by being unshared, and because the humiliation attached to it is the part that is genuinely not from God.

You are not the first believer to carry a fear that will not answer to argument. Scripture has men in it who saw remarkable things and were frightened again within the week, and the Spirit did not write one of them out of the record for it. 2 Timothy 1:12 was written by a man in a cell rather than by somebody with nothing left to be afraid of, and that is precisely why it is worth having.