The Folded Cardboard Under the Leg

The stall goes up the same way every Saturday and Rania could do it with her eyes shut: two trestles, the long board across them, the white cloth, then the bread. Flatbreads in their stacks, the sesame rings threaded on their string, the little jars of za'atar and sumac along the front where the light catches them. By eight the covered market is loud, and she likes it loud. She likes the man at the fish stall shouting his prices, and the two sisters who always buy one loaf between them and argue about which one, and the smell of cardamom drifting from the coffee cart three pitches down.

What she does not think about is the leg. The back left leg of the far trestle has been short since the year she bought it, and the floor there slopes, so she folded a piece of cardboard four times and wedged it under, for now. That was three years ago. The cardboard has gone soft and gray. Every Saturday she sets the trestle down on it without looking, and every Saturday the whole long board with everything on it rests on a fold of cardboard she meant to replace and never has.

Today a boy with a hand truck clips the leg. He is sorry, he is very sorry, and it is not really his fault; the cardboard simply gives, the way it was always going to. The board tips. Two stacks of bread go down, a jar of sumac breaks open red across the white cloth, and for one long second, in the middle of all that noise, Rania is standing with her hands out, looking at a trestle leg with nothing under it. The thought that comes is not about the bread. It is this: I have never once asked what all of this was standing on.

You have your own fold of cardboard. Something you wedged under your life for now, years ago, and stopped seeing: the job that was only ever meant to be temporary, the person whose steadiness you have been quietly borrowing, your own competence, the reputation for being fine. It has taken the weight so long you forgot it was there. And the frightening part is not that it might give. The frightening part is that if it does, you will find out what everything was resting on, and you already suspect the answer condemns you.

The question nobody is punished for asking

Let me say the weight out loud before I say anything else, because it has been on your back a long time and nobody has named it for you.

It is not that your life is unsteady. You know that. Nine addresses, or one address and a heart that never unpacked. It is that you never once dared to look under it. Somewhere you decided that if you ever asked what all of this was built on, the answer would be a verdict: that it was built on you, on your own holding, on a job or a person or a habit of coping, and that a life built on that is a life that deserves to tip. So you kept the question at arm's length the way Rania kept her eyes off the leg. Better not to know. Better to keep setting the trestle down.

I am not here to prosecute the cardboard. I want to be very plain about that, because a person who has been bracing for judgment hears it in every sentence. The cardboard was not a sin. It was a Saturday morning solution that outlived its Saturday. You leaned on what was in reach because you had a table to put up and people were already waiting in line. Nobody in heaven is standing over that trestle leg with a clipboard.

Here is what Paul wrote to a church that was arguing about which teacher they belonged to, which is its own kind of cardboard.

For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.1 Corinthians 3:11

Read the tense. Not will be laid. Not should be laid, if you get round to it. Laid. Somebody else did the work, before you arrived at the market, before you were born, before the ground under your ninth apartment was surveyed. You are standing on a foundation you did not lay, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that fact hold under you instead of staying ink on a page. That is not my idea. It is written, and He is the one applying it.

Now stay with me, because this is the part that changes the question. Rania's fear was that the answer to what is this standing on would be cardboard. But that was never the whole answer. Under the cardboard was the leg. Under the leg was the floor. Under the floor was the concrete slab of the market hall, and under that the ground itself, and the ground was not something she poured. Ask the question all the way down and you do not arrive at yourself. You arrive at bedrock, and bedrock has a name.

Colossians 1:17 says of Christ that He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. Not were held together once. Hold. Present tense, right now, the atoms of the trestle and the breath in your chest. You have been held together by Him on every one of the mornings you thought your own grip was doing it, and His Spirit was doing the holding while you were busy bracing. So the honest answer to what has my life been resting on is not me. It is Him, with a fold of cardboard on top that I mistook for the foundation.

That is why the question does not condemn you. The condemning version was always a half answer. It stopped at the cardboard because that is where your eyes stopped. Look one layer further and Romans 8:1 says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit who wrote that sentence through Paul is the same Spirit reading it back to you now. You were never on trial for what you leaned on. You are in Christ, and He is the rock the leaning was secretly resting on all along.

I know two things try to stand between you and receiving that. One says this kind of thing was for the apostles and the churches they wrote to, not for a woman with a spice stall in a covered market. The other says it may be for people in general but it is not for you in particular, not with your history of temporary. Hear me on both. The Word does not have a cut off date, and Jesus told His friends the Spirit would be with them for ever, which is a very long time and includes this Saturday. And no one in Paul's sentence is a very wide door. No one can lay another foundation. Not the steady person and not the unsteady one. The ground is the same under both.

You have been standing on Christ underneath every single thing you thought was holding you. First Corinthians 3:11 says other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old sentence about building land in a market on a Saturday.

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 the plain truth about what the honest look has stirred up. Being established by God has never been a reason to face a hard stretch without a real person in the room.