Though He Fall

The bag has been by the desk for six weeks.

She has not opened it. She walks past it several times a day and she has developed a way of walking past it that involves not turning her head.

She is not lazy and she is not depressed in the ordinary sense and she would want both of those said. She gets up. She does other things, some of them useful. What she cannot do is the one thing she is actually good at, and she cannot do it because the last time she did it, it went badly, in a way that had consequences.

And here is what has happened since, and she has only recently been able to name it.

She has become frightened of the work.

Not of failing again, exactly, although that is in it. It is more specific and more absurd: she is frightened of the moment of starting, because starting means being a person who does this again, and she is not sure she is allowed to be that person after what happened.

Six weeks. Every day it gets slightly harder rather than easier, which she did not expect and which frightens her more than the original thing did.

You may know that bag. Something you are good at that you have not been able to pick up since, and a fear that has attached itself not to failure but to the first minute.

Falling is in the sentence

Here is a verse, and the thing to notice is that it does not promise you will not fall.

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

Though he fall.

It is right there in the front of the sentence, stated as a normal event. Not if. Though. The falling is assumed, and the promise is built around it rather than instead of it.

And what the promise says is not that the fall will be prevented. It says: not utterly cast down. The word utterly is doing work. There is a difference between falling and being finished, and the verse puts the whole weight of the promise into that gap.

Then the reason: the LORD upholdeth him with his hand. Present tense, ongoing. That is not a rescue after the fact, it is a hand that is already under.

You are held by a hand that was under you during the fall and is under you in the six weeks since. Psalm 37:24 assumes the falling and promises against being finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a thing a woman can feel on the floor with her back against a bed.

Now let me name what is actually happening at the bag, because you got very close to it yourself.

The fear is not about the work. It is about being the kind of person who does this, and whether you are still entitled to be that after what happened. That is a question about permission, not about skill, and it cannot be answered by thinking about it, which is why six weeks of thinking has made it worse.

Permission questions get answered by doing the thing badly and finding out that nothing happens.

You are permitted to be a maker again today, and the permission does not wait on your feeling ready. The written word puts the falling into the sentence and keeps the hand underneath, and the Holy Spirit is not the one standing between you and the bag.

The honest half. It did go badly and there were consequences and I am not going to describe them as a learning experience. They were not. They were consequences.

And I am not going to tell you that God arranged the failure to develop something in you. That is not in the text and it does real harm to people in exactly your position.

There is a part only you can do, and it is deliberately unimpressive. Five minutes. Badly. On purpose badly, so that the aim is not to produce anything and cannot be failed. And then stop, before you want to.