The Buffer That Did Not Settle You

Dermot spent eleven years building a cushion so he would stop checking, and he checks more now than he did before he had one.

He noticed it in a very ordinary way. His son, who is fifteen and observant in the way that is not always convenient, said something across the kitchen about him being on his phone again, and Dermot said the thing you say, and then twenty minutes later he thought about it properly.

Before the cushion existed, he checked because there was a real question. There genuinely might not be enough. That is a hard way to live and he does not want it back and he is not romanticising it, but there was a certain grim simplicity to it: you look because you need to know.

Now there is no question. There has not been a real question for about four years.

And he looks more.

He worked out why on the stairs, of all places, and it is not complicated once you see it.

Before, there was a thing he was afraid of. Now, there is a thing he has to protect. And a thing you have to protect asks for attention every single day, in a way that a thing you are afraid of only asks for it when it is close.

The cushion did not remove the watching. It gave the watching a promotion.

Now hear the important thing before anybody uses this against themselves.

Dermot did nothing wrong. He built that cushion for good reasons, in years that were not easy, and there are people in his house who slept better because of it, and he would do it again and so would I.

And this message is not going to tell you that having a cushion is unspiritual, or that a person with a buffer trusts God less than a person without one. That is nonsense and it is cruel nonsense, because it usually lands on somebody who is one bad month from real trouble and has been holding on with both hands.

Scripture praises the person who looks ahead. Joseph filled barns on God's own instruction. Nobody in the Bible is ever rebuked for having prepared.

That is not what is going on here.

What is going on is smaller and stranger. A man built a thing to end a job, and the thing created a new job, and he has been working the new one for four years without ever once being told he had changed roles.

You have your own version. There was something you were going to have that would let you stop watching. You have it now, or something like it, and you are watching more, and you have quietly assumed that means you have not got enough of it yet.

Nobody is calling you anxious. You may be the calmest person in your house.

The job just changed and nobody sent a letter.

The proverb is about what you lean on, not what you own

There is a line in Proverbs that gets read as a threat to prosperous people, and the verb in it is the whole point.

He that trusteth in his riches shall fall: but the righteous shall flourish as a branch.Proverbs 11:28

Trusteth in. It is a leaning word. It is not about owning riches, it is about resting your weight on them, and the writer of Proverbs was not a man with anything against money, having written a whole book full of practical advice about handling it.

And look at what he puts opposite it. Not poverty. He does not say the poor shall flourish. He says the righteous shall flourish as a branch, which is an image about where a thing is attached, and a branch is not flourishing because of what it holds. It flourishes because of what it is joined to.

That is the whole distinction and it settles this article. The question was never how much is in the account. The question is where the weight is resting.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are attached. That is not my encouragement: the written word calls Him the vine and calls you a branch in Him, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a living thing in a man standing on his own stairs at nine at night.

And your weight is already held. Not once the cushion is bigger: the word says the eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms, and underneath is a load bearing word, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man actually feel what he is standing on rather than merely agreeing that it is there.

Nobody is coming for the cushion

I want to be very plain here, because this is where a message like this starts telling people to dismantle the thing that is holding their family steady, and I will not do that from a distance.

Nobody here is telling you to spend it, give it away, or reduce it. I do not know your household, your health, your year, whose care is coming, and a man who names somebody else's safe number from a page is meddling in something he cannot see.

I am not going to tell you what the figure should be, in either direction. Not higher, not lower. That is not what this site is for and it is not what I am for.

And nobody is telling you the eleven years were a mistake. They were not. God saw every one of them and the word says He is not unrighteous to forget your labor of love, so nothing about that work is being taken back.

The cushion is not the subject. The job description is.

And you have permission to stop guarding. Not once the number is right: the word says the Lord is thy keeper and thy shade upon thy right hand, and keeping is His stated job, and the Spirit is the one who makes that felt rather than merely believed, which is why a man can put a phone down without anything bad happening.

And nothing is going to be held together by your looking. That is not a rebuke, it is a relief. He upholds all things by the word of His power, says the written word, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this has been true through every single one of the years you were watching.