The Sky She Checks Too Often

Somebody said it at the end of a good evening and everybody around that table smiled.

He is coming back. That was all. It was said warmly, in passing, the way you might mention a person you love is due home on Friday.

And her stomach dropped.

Not a thought. She did not think anything. Her body did the thing first, the way it does when a car goes past too close, and by the time her mind arrived she was already braced and had to do the work of unbracing while smiling at somebody across a table.

That is what happens every time and it has happened for years.

She has never told anybody, and the reason she has never told anybody is that she cannot make it sound like anything other than a fault. Everybody at that table finds this a comfort. She has heard grown men say it is the best thing they have. Her own mother used to say it at the end of hard days like a person putting a coat on.

And it arrives in her as dread.

She is not afraid of dying. She has checked. She is not afraid of judgement in the way people mean it, and she is not carrying anything she has not put down.

She simply hears He is coming and something in her braces, every time, and she has been managing that in company for a very long while and has never once said it out loud.

If your stomach goes first too, come and sit out here a minute. Nobody is going to explain anything to you.

Look at the posture He asks for

There is an instruction from Jesus about His own return, and the thing worth noticing is what the body is doing in it.

And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.Luke 21:28

Look up. Lift up your heads.

That is not the posture of somebody bracing. A person bracing puts their head down and their shoulders up and makes themselves smaller, which is exactly what your body has been doing at that table for years.

Jesus asks for the opposite shape. He asks for the shape a person makes when somebody they love is arriving.

And He gives the reason in the same sentence, and the reason is not what most people carry: your redemption draweth nigh. Not your examination. Not your assessment. Redemption, which is a word about being bought back and brought home.

You are being called toward gladness rather than braced for a verdict, and the word says so in the body language it asks for. Luke 21:28 puts the head up and names redemption as the reason, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the earnest of our inheritance in Ephesians 1:14, which means what is coming toward you is the arrival of something already paid for.

Your body learned this somewhere, and it is not a fault

Now the thing that has never once been said out loud.

A stomach that drops is not a theological position. It is a body doing what it was taught, and bodies are taught by experience rather than by argument, which is exactly why nine good sermons have never once fixed it.

Somewhere, at some point, this subject arrived attached to fear. It may have been said by somebody frightening. It may have been a room from when you were small. It may be nothing anybody could locate now. It does not matter and nobody here is going to send you looking, because that would turn an article into an excavation. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and it is the same Spirit who comforts rather than investigates.

What matters is that it is not the same thing as your faith, and nobody gets to read your stomach as a verdict on your standing.

You are not disqualified by what your body does before your mind arrives. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds a person inside a body that reacts faster than they can think, which means the thing you have been hiding is a thing He already understands.

And I want to be very clear about what this article will not do. It will not describe anything. There is no scenario here, no sequence, no chart, nothing about the state of the world, and not one word designed to make you take this more seriously by making it more frightening. Fear is not a motive this site is willing to use, on any subject, and least of all on this one.

You have been given a Spirit who is not the fear kind, and that is a statement about what is in you rather than about what is ahead. 2 Timothy 1:7 says God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, and it is His Spirit named there, which means the bracing is not coming from where you have quietly assumed it comes from.

God is the one holding you, and He is not standing at the end of this waiting to find something out about you.