She Counts the Exits

Two doors and a window. That is this room. She got it in the first four seconds and she was not trying, and she has already worked out that the window opens outward and there is a drop of about four feet onto grass.

She is forty-one. She does it in restaurants, in offices, in the row of a theater, at a friend's kitchen table, on a train. She has never once needed any of the information and she has never once failed to collect it. If you asked her about it she would look genuinely puzzled and say everybody does that, and she would believe it, because she has never had a conversation in which she found out otherwise.

She has never told anybody. Not because it is a secret. Because it has never come up, and because it is like being asked whether you notice the color of a wall. It is simply what a room is.

She learned it early, and I am going to leave it there, because this is the point where the easy article turns into a case history and I am not going to write that one. I am not going to tell a stranger why her body does this, and I am certainly not going to build a theory about the people who raised her, because I do not know them and neither does anyone reading this, and handing a reader a villain is not the same as handing her help.

What I will say is a description. Some people learned young to know where the ways out were, and their bodies never stopped doing the arithmetic. That is not a fault. It is a skill that outlived the situation it was for, and it is exhausting in a way its owner has never been able to see, because she has nothing to compare it to.

Somebody takes a person up

Let me put a line down and look at what the verb actually is.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.Psalm 27:10

Take me up is a picking up. The word underneath it is the one used for gathering something in, receiving it, bringing it into your own keeping. It is not a promise of vigilance. It is a promise of custody.

And notice the structure. David does not say if. He writes into the space where a person has been left, whatever the leaving was and whoever did it, and he puts a taking up on the other side of it. He is not adjudicating the leaving. He is naming who does the gathering afterward.

You are taken up, and the gathering was done by the Lord rather than by how well you have watched the room. That is not a soft word for a woman who has been counting since she was nine. It is what is written in Psalm 27, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and sets it into a body in a church hall. Two doors and a window is information. Being taken up is custody.

And there is a second half of that psalm worth having. Four verses earlier David writes about being hidden in a pavilion, set up upon a rock. Hidden and set high, both at once, which is the whole grammar of what a watchful person is trying to accomplish on her own every time she walks into a room.

You have been hidden and set on a rock by Someone who does the watching Himself. Psalm 27:5 is where the word puts it, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old psalm land in a woman who has already found the exits.

The counting is not a sin and it is not going to be argued away

Now the part this category exists for, and it goes ahead of everything.

She is not being asked to repent of anything. There is nothing wrong with a person who knows where the doors are. Half the people who have ever kept somebody safe have had exactly this faculty, and it is a good one. What is happening is not sin. It is a watch that nobody ever relieved.

And I want to be honest about something else, because pretending otherwise would be useless. She is not going to stop doing it because she read an article. A body that has counted exits for thirty-two years does not put that down because a mind agreed with a paragraph. Anybody who has tried to argue themselves out of a reflex knows exactly how far that gets.

So the offer is not stop. The offer is different.

He that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:3-4

There is already a watch. It is staffed. It is staffed by Someone who does not sleep and has not slept through any of the thirty-two years. She is not the only one watching that room and she never has been.

You were never the only one watching, and the other watch has never once been off duty. Psalm 121:4 is where that stands, and it is His Spirit who lets a person who has been alone on a wall find out there was somebody else on it.

You are held right now, in a room whose exits you have already counted, and the counting did not earn it and cannot lose it. It is written that the Lord takes a person up and that the one who keeps does not slumber, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in a body that has been on a wall since it was nine.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor about the counting and about what it costs. A body that has been alert this long often needs a real person to help it stand down, and being taken up by God has never been a reason to do that alone.