The Same Hill, The Same Rain

There is a slab of wet rock on the path above Aileen's house that she has gone down on in every winter of her life.

She is fifty three. So that is a number she does not care to make precise, and she does not have to, because the point is not the number, the point is that it is always that slab.

Not the steep part further up, which frightens people and which she has never once slipped on. Not the loose scree at the top. It is a piece of ordinary flat rock, forty minutes from the top, at a place where the path is easy and where you have stopped concentrating because the hard bit is behind you.

She has been careful there. Genuinely careful, for years, in the way that a person is careful about a thing they know. And it still happens.

And what has changed lately is not the frequency. It is what she thinks on the way down.

There was a time when she thought: ow. Now, in the half second in the air, she thinks: of course.

That word is what she came here about, and she would not be able to say that out loud to anybody, because it sounds like nothing. Of course. Two syllables. But there is a whole doctrine in that word, and she has been quietly teaching it to herself for about a decade: this is what I do, this is what happens on this ground, this was always going to be the outcome.

She has stopped being surprised by herself, and she has begun to believe that the surprise was the only thing that had been holding the line.

That belief has a practical edge to it, which is what makes it dangerous rather than merely sad. Because if the surprise was the defense, then the loss of it is the loss of the defense, and the sensible response to losing a defense is to stop going up the hill.

She has not stopped. Not yet. But she has noticed herself, twice this year, finding a reason not to, and the reasons were good ones, and she is not sure they were the actual reasons.

That is how a slab forty minutes from the summit ends up taking the whole hill off somebody.

And this is where I stop writing about Aileen, because you have a slab.

I am not going to ask where it is and I am not going to ask how many winters. That is yours and it stays yours.

Read the whole sentence

I want to give you a verse that gets quoted in half, and the half that gets left out is the half you need tonight.

Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand.Psalm 37:24

The first half is usually the one people know, and on its own it can sound like encouragement of the flimsier sort: you will be all right, it will not be as bad as it looks.

But look at the word though. That is a concession, right at the front of the sentence. Scripture is not disputing the falling. It is granting it. It says: yes. Falling. That happens. Now here is what else is true.

And then the second half, which is the whole point and which is almost never quoted: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand.

For. It is a reason. The reason he is not utterly cast down is not that the fall was small, and not that he is resilient, and not that he learned something last time. It is that somebody's hand is under him.

So take that on the wet slab where you actually go down. You are not utterly cast down and you never have been, and Psalm 37:24 says the Lord upholdeth him with his hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact you can feel rather than a line you have read.

Now sit with what the verse does not promise, because that is where its honesty is.

It does not promise no falling. It concedes the falling in its first word. What it rules out is a specific outcome: utterly cast down. Utterly. Finally. All the way. And that outcome is ruled out not by anything about the person but by the hand underneath them, and the written word puts that hand in God's arm rather than in your carefulness, and the Spirit of God has been under you on every one of those winters.