The Thought Never Arrives On Its Own

It comes at about twenty to six in the morning, before anybody else is up, when she is standing at the sink with the tap running and no reason to be standing there.

The thought is four words long. What if I stopped.

And it gets, at most, a second and a half on its own before the rest of it lands on top.

The house is the first thing, because the house belongs to the church, so the thought is never what if I stopped. The thought is what if I stopped and where does everybody sleep. Then the school, because the school is nine minutes away and the younger one has finally settled and she can name the exact week that happened. Then the woman who has been coming to her on Thursday mornings for two years and would have nobody. Then the one who is training and has nobody else to train under. Then her husband's whole life, which is here, in this town, for reasons that were originally hers.

By the time the tap has been running for fifteen seconds she is doing arithmetic on other people's lives, and by twenty seconds she has arrived at the same place she always arrives at, which is: I do not get to think about this.

And she turns the tap off.

This has happened, by her honest count, somewhere over a hundred times.

And here is the thing she has never once said to anybody: she is not upset about the house, or the school, or the Thursday woman. She would carry any of it, gladly, for years. What is wearing her out is that she has not been allowed to want anything for herself for so long that the wanting cannot get four seconds of air before it is buried under the costing.

She has never had the thought. Not once, all the way through, as a thought.

And she has decided something about that, quietly, in the way you decide things at twenty to six. She has decided that a woman in her position who keeps having a thought she is not allowed to have must be a woman with something wrong in her.

Now that is you at the sink, and you have known it was you since the first line.

You are allowed to want something in here

Let me say what is not going to happen on this page, because you have braced for both of them.

Nobody here is going to talk you into staying. Not with encouragement, not with guilt, not with a story about a woman who nearly walked away and weeps with gratitude now. And nobody here is going to tell you to go. That is not mine to hand you, I do not know your house or your town or your people, and both of those are just different ways of making a very tired woman carry a decision at twenty to six in the morning.

There is no decision on this page. Set it down for twenty minutes. It will keep. It has kept a hundred times.

There is nothing to do here either. No practice to sharpen, nothing to get up earlier for, no discipline to add. You are running on empty, and a suggestion is the last thing empty needs.

What I want to give you is four seconds. Just the thought, on its own, with nothing attached to it, in a room where nobody is going to cost it out.

Because God gave a man those four seconds, and then He put what the man said into the songbook of His own people, and it has been sung ever since.

And I say, "Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest."Psalm 55:6

That is a king. That is a man with a household, a nation, obligations reaching in every direction, and people whose entire lives ran on his decisions.

And what he wrote down is: I want wings and I want out.

Not a plan. Not a resignation. A wish, said all the way through, out loud, with nothing costed.

God did not edit a tired man's wish to fly away out of His own book, and He is not embarrassed by yours at a sink at twenty to six. He kept it. He had it set to music. He had it sung by congregations for three thousand years. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes a line written by a king under pressure and gives it to a woman with the tap running.

And look at what that psalm does next, because it does not resolve into a strategy.

Six verses later he writes: cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you (Psalm 55:22). The wish came first. The sustaining came after. He did not have to put the wish away in order to be sustained, and there is no sentence anywhere in that psalm where God asks him to take it back.

Wanting to be somewhere with nothing required of you is not a betrayal of the people you carry, and it is not the first step out the door. It is written that Jesus said, come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28), and He did not say it to people who had put their obligations down first. He said it to people carrying them. His Spirit is what turns that from a verse into a chair pulled out.

Now here is the part about the arithmetic, and I want to be careful with it, because I am not going to hand you any advice about a house or a school or a town. That is not what this page is for and it never will be.

But I will name the weight, because naming it is not the same as prescribing anything.

The reason your thought never gets to be a thought is that your life is stitched to other people's at every single point, and that is not a fault in you. That is the shape of what you took on. It is genuinely heavier than a thought.

God is not waiting for you to untangle any of that before He comes near you, and He has never once made His nearness conditional on your position. It is written that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18), and there is no clause in it about sorting out your circumstances first. His Spirit is the one who stands in a kitchen at twenty to six with no interest whatsoever in whose house it is.

And I need to say this plainly, because it matters more than anything else on this page. If any of this has traveled further than tiredness, if you have found yourself thinking that everybody would manage better without you in the world at all, please tell a human being today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line or emergency number, and one person who knows your name and can sit with you. Being the woman who holds everything does not disqualify you from putting your hand up.

You are not a woman with something wrong in her. You are a woman who has not been allowed to want anything for herself in a very long time, and heaven has never once held that against you. It is written that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and now is the word in it, not later and not once the arithmetic works. The Holy Spirit is the one who reads a verdict like that over a sink.