The Shoes by the Bed

They are always in the same place, which is on the floor on the right side of the bed, toes pointing out into the room. She could put her feet in them in the dark in under two seconds and she has never once timed it and she knows that number anyway.

She is thirty. She has lived in this apartment for two years and it is the longest she has lived anywhere since she was fifteen. It is quiet. The neighbors are pleasant. There is nothing to be ready for.

What she noticed last month, and could not stop noticing afterward, is that she has no memory of deciding to do this. She did not start it. She cannot locate a first night. It is simply a thing her body does, and it does it in a safe apartment in a quiet street with a bolt on the door, and it will presumably do it in the next place too.

I am going to be careful now, because there is an obvious move available here and I am not going to make it. I am not going to tell anybody why they do this. I am not going to construct a theory about her childhood, and I am not going to say anything at all about the people who raised her, because I do not know them and neither does anybody else reading this, and turning a family into an explanation is a cheap trick that costs the reader something real.

Here is all I will say about the past, and it is a description rather than a diagnosis: some people grew up not knowing where they would be living, and their bodies learned things. That is not a defect and it is not a wound to be excavated in an article. It is a fact, and it means a body has been ready for a long time, and it is tired.

The one sentence God says about His own consistency

Let me put down a line that God says about Himself in the first person, which is rarer than people think.

For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.Malachi 3:6

Two halves and the second one is a consequence of the first. He does not change, and the result of that, in the sentence, is that a people who by any reasonable measure should have been finished are still here. God's consistency is presented not as a nice attribute but as the reason anybody survived anything.

Malachi is the last book before four hundred years of silence, written to people who had come back from exile to a mess. Not a triumphant audience. A tired one, in a half rebuilt city, with plenty of reasons to expect the next thing to go wrong too.

You are held by a God who states His own unchangingness in the first person, and your survival is credited to it rather than to your readiness. That is not a soothing line laid over a long habit. It is what is written in Malachi 3, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and puts it into a body that keeps its shoes pointing at the door. The apartments change. He does not.

And notice the tense. I change not. Present, continuous, with no end date and no conditions attached, and no requirement that anybody feel it before it is true.

You have a God who is exactly as unchanged this morning as He was in every place you have ever slept. Malachi 3:6 is the written word for it, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old prophet land in a quiet bedroom on an ordinary Tuesday.

A body learns at the speed a body learns

Now the part that matters most, and it is about time.

A body does not learn a thing because a mind agrees with it. That is the whole difficulty, and anybody who has tried to reason themselves out of a reflex knows it. She can believe every word of Malachi 3:6 and her hands will still put those shoes in that place tonight, and that is not hypocrisy and it is not weak faith. It is a nervous system doing what nervous systems do, which is to change slowly, through repetition, in the direction of evidence.

So the offer here is not: understand this and stop. The offer is: give the body something repeatable to learn from.

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

Underneath is a physical word. Moses is not describing a concept. He is describing the direction a thing comes from, which is the same direction the floor comes from, and it is meant to be felt rather than agreed with.

You were given everlasting arms underneath, and the underneath is where a body learns rather than where a mind decides. Deuteronomy 33:27 is the line it rests on, and it is His Spirit who takes a promise and lets it be felt in a body over months rather than in a mind over minutes.

You are safe this morning, and your body does not have to know it yet for it to be true. It is written that the Lord does not change and that underneath are the everlasting arms, and it is the Holy Spirit who teaches that slowly to somebody who has been ready since she was small.

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 shoes and the nights. A body that has been ready for twenty years often needs a real person to help it stand down, and being held by God has never been a reason to do that alone.