It Is What My Hand Does When I Am Uneasy

Nell noticed it on a Wednesday when the thing that had gone wrong had nothing to do with anything.

A conversation at work. Not a row, nothing that would be reported anywhere, just a short exchange in which somebody was cooler with her than usual and she could not work out why. She sat back down at her desk with that particular flat feeling, and within about fifteen seconds her hand had brought the phone up and she was looking at the figure.

It has no bearing on the conversation. It could not have had. Nothing about a balance was going to explain why a colleague was short with her, and Nell is not a woman who confuses those things.

But her hand did not know that. Her hand knew that something was wrong and went to the place it goes.

She started paying attention after that, and over the following fortnight she caught it again and again. After a difficult phone call about her father. After she read something in the news. After ten minutes of not being able to get a piece of work right. Every time: unease first, and then, inside half a minute, a look at something that had nothing to do with the unease.

She is thirty-six. If you asked her what she trusts she would say God without a flicker, and she would be telling the truth. She is not a woman living in fear and there is no crisis anywhere near that account.

Ask her what her hand does when something is wrong, and the honest answer is a different answer, and she had never put the two side by side.

Your version might be something else entirely. But you may recognize the shape: something unsettles you, and then, quickly, before you have thought, you consult a thing that could not possibly speak to what has just happened.

Nobody is accusing you of anything. The evidence here is a sequence, and sequences can be watched without anybody confessing a motive.

Something has been given the unease.

Nothing has to be wrong for something to be out of place

Let me put the freeing thing first, or you will spend the rest of this defending yourself and hear none of it.

Looking is not sin. Knowing what you have is not sin. Being careful with what you are responsible for is not sin, and Scripture never treats a person who keeps track of their own affairs as somebody of small faith. If you arrived braced to be told that carefulness is faithlessness, put that down. It is not true and this page will not say it.

The question is not whether you look. It is what your hand goes to when something is wrong, and whether you ever chose it.

David gives an instruction to his own soul, out loud, which is a strange and useful thing to watch a man do.

My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.Psalm 62:5

Two things to notice, and the second one is the one for you.

Wait thou only upon God. He is talking to himself, giving his own interior a direction, which means he had noticed it going somewhere else. That is not a man in perfect condition writing about his calm. That is a man redirecting something that had already moved.

And then: my expectation is from him. Expectation is the word for where you look for the next thing to come from. It is not about belief in general. It is about the direction a person leans when they are waiting to find out whether things are all right.

You have somewhere your soul can wait that answers what is actually wrong. Not a reading that has nothing to do with it. The written word has a man speak to his own soul about direction, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman sitting back down at a desk after a short conversation.

Now let me say something about the app, because it has done nothing wrong.

It is a tool, and it does a narrow job well. Nothing on this page wants you to delete it, and no rule is coming about how often is acceptable. The trouble is not that you look. The trouble is that a tool has been handed something outside its competence: general unease, of any kind, from any source, including sources it knows nothing about.

You are not being asked to become careless. The written word never rebukes anybody for knowing where they stand, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a woman who keeps track.

And now the part that is actually costly.

When unease goes to something that cannot answer it, the unease does not get answered. It gets postponed by about four seconds and then comes back, which is why a fortnight of that leaves a person tired without anything having happened.

You are not being failed by your own soul. My expectation is from him, and David had to say it out loud to himself, which tells you it does not stay pointed by itself. The Holy Spirit has been with you in every one of those fifteen second gaps.