The Drive Home She Cannot Remember

She parked, and then she sat there, because she could not remember any of it.

Nine miles. Two intersections, a set of lights that is always red, the bit by the school where you have to let people out. She knows she did all of that because the car is on the drive and there is no damage on it. She simply has no memory of a single second between the staff exit and her own driveway, and she sat with the keys in her hand at twenty past eight in the morning and felt something cold go through her that was not tiredness.

Twelve hours. Four call bells at once at three in the morning. A man in bay six who wanted to talk about his wife, who died in February, and she stood and let him, because you do, and then she went and did the drug round twenty minutes behind.

And at the handover, a newer one on days said what people always say to her. Honestly, you are so calm. Nothing fazes you. I want to be like you in ten years.

She said something light. She got her coat.

I am going to say the true thing straight out, because the ward will not. Calm is not a quality she has. Calm is the last thing standing after everything else has been used up, and what happened on the drive home is what happens when the last thing standing gets asked for nine miles more.

You know this. Yours might not have call bells in it. But you have a stretch where you go on autopilot and come out the other side unable to account for yourself, and somebody has recently praised you for exactly the thing that is costing you the most.

Count the cost, before anybody says calm

The handover did not count it, so let us.

It costs her sleep in the wrong shape, four hours at a time in daylight with the curtains taped. It costs her the ordinary week: Saturdays gone, a friend's wedding missed, a mother she rings from the staff room. It costs her the freedom to say I am not all right to somebody at work, because if the calm one says it out loud the whole ward feels it.

And it cost her nine miles on Tuesday, which frightened her more than she has told anybody.

You have been running on the last of yourself, and God has never once treated the running out as a failing in you. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and the same Spirit is the one who takes a line like that off a page and puts it in a parked car at twenty past eight. He was not on the ward admiring her drug round. He was in the passenger seat for nine miles she cannot remember.

He does not let a foot slip, and nobody watches Him do it

There is one line for a woman with the keys still in her hand.

He will not suffer your foot to be moved: he that keeps you will not slumber.Psalm 121:3

Look at what it gives her. Not stamina. A keeper. And the keeper is described entirely by what He does not do: He does not let the foot move, He does not sleep. All of the action in that sentence is on His side of it and none of it is on hers, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a night shift rather than a nice thought about God in general.

You have been kept on a road you cannot remember driving, and the keeping was not something you produced out of yourself. That is not me flattering a tired woman. The written word gives the whole verb to Him, and the Spirit is the one holding somebody steady through a year her reserves went out in. The ward thanked the wrong one. Nobody at a handover can see a keeper.

And I will say this once, plainly, because otherwise the site becomes another weight. Those nights are not a display. They were not arranged so a ward could learn something by watching her hold. God did not fill bay six to make a point to a newer nurse. She is not an exhibit and she never was.

Two things a woman on nights has to hear

The first is that God still keeps people. Not kept, poetically, in an older world. Keeps, present tense, on the highway at eight in the morning. If the keeper is only a lovely image then Tuesday was just fatigue, the ward had it right, and there is nowhere at all to take the cold feeling in the driveway.

The second is that the keeping is over her. Now. Not over nurses who sleep properly. Not over people with easier bays.

You have a keeper who was given to you rather than earned, and He does not step back on the mornings you cannot account for yourself. Isaiah 40:31 says those who wait on the Lord renew their strength, and it is His Spirit who makes renew something that happens in a body rather than something a mind agrees with.

One honest sentence before we go on. If the cold feeling comes back, or the tiredness has gone somewhere frightening, please tell one real human being today, and if the thought of carrying on is genuinely in question, call your doctor or a crisis line before you call anybody at work. That is not the keeping failing. That is the keeping arriving with a face and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.