Four Times on the Front Door

He pulls the handle up, turns the key, and pushes the door with the flat of his hand. Then he does it again. Then a third time, and on the third one he says the word locked under his breath, quietly, because saying it seems to help it stick.

Then he gets to the end of the path and comes back and does it a fourth time.

The fourth one is the one that costs. The first three happen inside the ordinary business of leaving a house and nobody passing would notice them. The fourth means walking back up a path in full view of a street, and he has known for about a year that Mrs Achebe at number nine waters her plants at that hour.

So he leaves ten minutes earlier now.

That is the part he has never said to anybody, and it is the part that would tell you everything. Not that he checks. That he has restructured a morning around not being seen checking. Ten minutes, five days a week, for however long this has been going on, which he could not tell you exactly because there was no first day.

He is not frightened of burglars. If you asked him directly whether he thinks somebody is coming, he would say no, and he would mean it, and he would still go back a fourth time.

What he is doing at that door is not a calculation about crime. It is the only place in his whole life where he can produce a feeling of done, and it does not hold, and so he goes back.

That is you, and you have never once said the ten minutes out loud.

The first thing, before anything else

Nobody on this page is going to tell you that this is a faith problem.

I want that said early and said plainly, because if you have been anywhere near religious language on this subject you may have picked up the idea that a person with real peace would not be walking back up a path, and that the checking is therefore evidence about your relationship with God. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 4:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

It is not. It has never once been that.

A brain that has learned to produce alarm in a house with a perfectly good lock on it is doing something a brain does, and Scripture nowhere treats that as a spiritual failing. It contains a great many people who were afraid: Elijah under a tree asking to die, David saying he is poured out like water, a whole psalm that ends on the word darkness with nothing resolved. None of them is corrected for the fear itself.

You are not less His this morning because of the fourth check. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it puts no condition of composure in front of that at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a thing you can actually feel on a path in front of a neighbor.

I am also not going to tell you to stop checking, because I am not the person to tell you that and this is not that kind of page. If this is grinding down your days, there are people who work with exactly this and who are good at it, and going to them is not a lesser road than prayer. It never has been.

What the fourth one is actually for

Here is what is really happening, and naming it will not switch it off but it will stop it spreading.

The first three checks are about the door. The fourth is not.

The fourth is about a feeling. You are going back for the sensation of certainty, and the sensation does not arrive, or it arrives and then evaporates before you reach the corner, and so the checking has quietly changed jobs. It started as a thing you did to a door. It became the only mechanism you have for producing safety, and it is a mechanism that has to be run again every single time because it never actually holds. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 4:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

That is not a character flaw. It is a machine that was built for something small and has been asked to carry something enormous.

And it is worth seeing what it is being asked to carry. Not a burglary. The whole of it: the year that went wrong, the news, the thing that happened to somebody you know, the general sense that anything can arrive without warning, all of it funnelled down into one brass handle because a handle is the only part of it you can put your hand on.

The handle was never going to be able to hold all of that. It is a handle.

Where the psalm puts the safety

There is one line in Psalm 4 that is worth the whole of this page, and it is worth it because of a single small word most people read past.

I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.Psalm 4:8

Only.

He does not say the Lord makes him dwell in safety, which would be a nice thing to say and would sit comfortably next to a good lock. He says only. He is fencing something off. Everything else in the sentence has been moved out of the safety-producing business, and what is left standing there is God.

And look at where David is when he writes it. Read the psalm from the top: he is being lied about, people are turning his honor into shame, he is asking God how long. He is not sleeping soundly because his circumstances are settled. They are not settled at all.

That is the exact shape of your morning. Not a man whose life is fine writing about peace. A man with real trouble putting the safety somewhere other than his own arrangements.

You are not the thing holding this house up. Scripture says thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety, Psalm 4:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence like that back up a garden path with you.

What that does not mean

Let me guard it in the same breath, because a line like that gets misused.

It does not mean nothing bad happens to people God keeps. It obviously does. David is writing that psalm in the middle of something bad. Anybody who tells you that faith functions as a shield against events is not reading the book they are quoting from.

What it means is narrower and much stronger. The keeping of your life was never assigned to you, and it is not currently resting on whether you went back a fourth time. That was never the arrangement. You have been trying to hold up something that is not yours to hold, with a mechanism that cannot do it, and the exhaustion you feel is not weakness, it is the entirely predictable result of a person doing a job that belongs to God.

You have been carrying something you were never handed. Scripture says cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee, Psalm 55:22, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a weight off a person rather than requiring them to put it down by force of will.

The ten minutes

And now the part that is actually costing you, which is not the checking.

It is the hiding.

The checking is a thing your brain is doing. The ten minutes are a decision you make, every morning, out of shame, and shame is a much heavier object than a lock. You have arranged an entire schedule so that a woman watering her plants at number nine will not see you. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Psalm 4:8, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

She would not think what you think she would think. Almost nobody ever does. But that is not really the point, because the cost is not what she thinks, it is the ten minutes, and the loneliness inside them, and the fact that this has been going on for a year and there is not one person alive who knows about it.

You are not required to hide this. Scripture says confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, James 5:16, and it is worth noticing that it says faults and puts no shame in the sentence anywhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets one true sentence out of a person who has been managing a morning alone for a year.

One person. Not the street. One.