The Woman They Call An Encouragement

Eight of them in a circle of mismatched chairs, and the baby is asleep on her chest.

She got there late because the car seat strap was twisted and she cried about the strap in the driveway for ninety seconds and then fixed it. Nobody knows about the ninety seconds. What they know is that she came, with a baby and a bag and a tray of something, and that she laughed at the right place in Priya's story, and that when Marcus said his week had been hard she leaned forward and asked the second question, the one nobody asks.

So at the end, when they go round, Denise says it. She says it warmly and she means it completely. Honestly, you are such an encouragement to this group. Everybody agrees. Somebody says amen. Somebody else says we would fall apart without you, and laughs, and half means it.

Four days ago she sat in a room with a screen turned away from her and a radiographer who went very quiet.

Nobody in that circle knows. She has not told a soul. And the thing she cannot say back, the thing sitting under her tongue for the whole hour, is not I am struggling. It is smaller and worse than that. It is: whatever you think you are looking at, it is not in here.

You know this. You have your own circle and your own tray and your own second question, and you have a thing four days old that nobody in the room has been told. And the loneliest part is not the fear. It is that eight people just told you they saw you, and not one of them did.

Say the cost first. Nobody in that circle counted it

Let me count it, because somebody has to and it will not be Denise.

It costs the drive home. It costs the sentence you rehearse in case somebody asks properly, and the small collapse when nobody does. It costs the right to be tired in front of the people who love you, because you have been filed under encouragement now and a file is heavy. And it costs the four days. Four days of carrying a screen turned away from you, alone, while asking Marcus the second question.

You have been carrying something for four days that nobody in that room could see, and God has not once mistaken you for the tray you brought. Psalm 139:2 says He knows the sitting down and the rising up and understands the thought a long way off, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that from a nice line about God and makes it a hand on your back in a driveway. He was not fooled by the laugh at the right place. He was there for the ninety seconds.

The verse the circle only knows half of

There is a line the whole room could quote and nobody in it was applying to you.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.Psalm 46:1

Look at the order of it. Refuge first. Not strength first. The Psalm does not open by admiring anybody's resilience; it opens with a place you go into. And then, present help. Present. Not available. Not on record. In the room, at the mismatched chairs, at the twisted car seat strap, four days ago in the dark with the screen turned away.

You are inside a refuge right now, and being inside it is exactly what those eight people have been mistaking for a personality. That is not me being lovely about you. The written word puts the refuge in front of the strength on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding a woman upright in a week where her own reserves went out with the tide. Nobody in that circle thanked the right person. They cannot see walls.

And can I say the hard, freeing thing? Your hard week is not a display. It was not arranged so that a small group could learn something from watching you cope. God did not turn the screen away in order to make a point to Denise. You are not an exhibit and you never were.

Two things a bright, tired woman has to hear

First: God still shelters people. Not sheltered, poetically, in an older world. Shelters, present tense, this Thursday. If refuge is only a lovely metaphor, then that circle was right, this is just very good coping, and there is nowhere to put four days.

Second: it is this shelter, over you, now. Not over women with quieter weeks. Not over the ones who told the group.

You have a refuge that was given to you rather than earned by you, and it does not withdraw on a Thursday when you have nothing to bring. Nahum 1:7 says the Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble, and He knows the ones who take shelter in Him, and His Spirit is the one who makes that knowing something felt rather than something conceded.

One more honest sentence before we go on. If the four days have gone somewhere darker than fear, if the thought has come that everyone would manage without you, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you call anybody else. That is not the shelter failing. That is the shelter arriving with a face on it, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.