He Has Hold of Your Hand

There was a night in February and she can tell you the day of the week.

Not a dramatic night. She was on the landing at about one in the morning, having got up for something, and she stopped at the top of the stairs and realized, in a completely flat way, that she was not holding on any more.

She had been. For about two years she had been doing the thing everybody describes: keeping hold, hanging on, gripping. She had said it herself out loud in a small group once, and everyone had nodded, because it is the language people use.

And on the landing in February it had simply stopped. Not a decision. Not a rejection. She looked for the grip in herself and it was not there, and she went back to bed.

She is fifty-seven.

And what she has been doing ever since, without ever putting it in a sentence, is waiting.

She has been waiting for the consequences. Because if you have been told all your life that the holding on is your part, then the day your grip fails is the day the thing you were holding gets away from you, and she has been braced for months for something to go.

Nothing has gone. She still gets up. She still prays, in a plain way, without much in it. Her life is intact and her faith is, as far as she can tell, exactly where she left it, and she does not understand why, and the not understanding has begun to worry her more than the letting go did.

Whose hand is doing the holding

There is a verse in the seventy-third psalm which is the answer to your landing in February, and it turns entirely on who is the subject of the second clause.

Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my right hand.Psalm 73:23

Thou hast holden me.

Not I have held on to Thee. The grip described there belongs to God, and the man is the one being held, and his right hand is the object rather than the instrument.

And look at the word it opens with. Nevertheless. That word is doing enormous work, because the verses before it are Asaph describing himself as brutish and ignorant, as a beast before God. He is at his lowest estimate of himself in the whole psalm, and the very next thing he says is that God has hold of his hand.

The nevertheless is exactly your February.

You are held by a grip that was never yours, and it did not slacken on the night yours gave out. That is not me smoothing over what happened on that landing; Psalm 73:23 puts the holding in God's hand and the person on the receiving end of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old psalm and stands it at the top of a staircase at one in the morning.

Why nothing fell

Now let me answer the question that has actually been troubling you, because you are an honest woman and the silence since February has bothered you more than the failure did.

Nothing fell because you were never the one holding it up.

That is the whole answer. You have spent months braced for a consequence that could only have arrived if the arrangement were what you were taught it was. The consequence has not come because the arrangement is different, and the months of nothing happening are not a delay. They are the evidence.

You have been given four months of proof and reading it as suspense. The written word puts the holding on God's side of the sentence and never puts a person's grip in charge of the outcome, and the Holy Spirit has been the one keeping a woman upright since a Tuesday night in February.

And I want to say something about the language you were given, because it did you real harm and it was handed to you by people who meant well. Hold on. Keep hold. Do not let go. It is everywhere and it sounds like faith and it is a small poison, because it makes a tired person the load-bearing member of their own salvation.

There is a season in most lives where a person's grip fails, and if the grip were the thing, nobody would survive one. You were never the load-bearing member of this, and the strength of your hand has never been what any of it rested on. Scripture has Asaph at his own lowest estimate saying God has hold of him, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on that in a woman with nothing left to grip with.