The Drawer I Do Not Open

It is the second drawer down in the hall, the one that used to have batteries in it, and there are about forty things in there now.

Not all of them are bad. That is the part she would tell you first if she could say any of it out loud. There is a card in there from her niece. There is something from the surgery that is probably an appointment. There is, she is fairly sure, a refund.

She cannot open any of them, because opening one would mean opening the drawer, and opening the drawer would mean the whole pile in one afternoon.

It started about two years ago with one letter she was frightened of. She put it in the drawer, meaning to do it that evening. She did not. And then a second one arrived that was probably about the first one, and after that it stopped being about any individual letter at all.

Now the post comes at about half past eight and there is a small jolt in her chest at the sound of it, every morning, before she has seen what it is. Sometimes it is a catalogue. The jolt does not know the difference.

She has developed a walk past the mat that does not involve looking down.

That is you, and there is a card from your niece in there.

Nobody here is calling this a faith problem

Let me say that first, because if you have been anywhere near religious talk about worry you may have collected the idea that a person with real trust would open her post, and that the drawer is therefore evidence about your standing with God. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 112:7, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

It is not. It never has been.

Avoidance is what a person does when the cost of looking has been higher than the cost of not looking for long enough that the arithmetic set. That is a thing minds do, and Scripture nowhere treats it as a spiritual failing. The Bible is full of people hiding: Elijah in a cave, Gideon threshing wheat in a winepress so nobody would see, Jonah on a boat going the other way. Not one of them is dealt with by being told they should have had more faith.

You are not further from God because of a drawer. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it puts no condition of composure anywhere in front of that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it near enough to lean on in a hallway at half past eight.

And if this has grown past what you can manage, people work with exactly this and are good at it. Going to them is not a lesser road than prayer, and it never was.

The verse is about a settled heart, not a settled life

There is a line in Psalm 112 that gets read as a promise about circumstances and is nothing of the kind.

He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the LORD.Psalm 112:7

Read what it does not say. It does not say the evil tidings do not come. They come. That is why the sentence exists at all; nobody writes a line about not fearing bad news in a world where bad news does not arrive.

What it describes is a heart that is fixed, which is a mooring word. Not a heart that has been reassured, and not a person who has worked out that the news will be fine. Something tied to a point that does not move, so that when the tidings come the whole boat does not go with them.

That matters here, because you have been trying to achieve steadiness by controlling the information. If I do not read it, it has not happened yet. And that works, for about eleven hours a day, and it costs you the jolt every morning and forty things in a drawer.

You are not required to manage the news in order to be steady. Scripture says his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord, Psalm 112:7, and the fixing is done by the trusting rather than by the knowing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the mooring in a person who cannot currently open an envelope.

What is actually in the drawer

Here is the thing worth seeing plainly, and you already half know it.

The drawer is not full of bad news. It is full of unknown news, and unknown news is worse, because your mind has quietly assigned every single item in there the value of the worst one.

Forty envelopes, all of them carrying the emotional weight of the one you were frightened of two years ago. That is what makes the drawer unopenable. It is not forty problems. It is one fear, photocopied forty times, and there is a card from your niece somewhere in the middle of it wearing the same coat as the rest.

You are not looking at forty pieces of bad news. Scripture says God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, 2 Timothy 1:7, and a sound mind is exactly what cannot operate while everything in a drawer has been assigned the same value, and the Holy Spirit is the one who restores proportion where a person has lost it.

Somebody else's hands

Now the practical part, and it is not what you are expecting. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 112:7, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

I am not going to tell you to sit down and open them all. That is the advice everybody would give and it is why nobody has ever done it. Forty in one afternoon, alone, is exactly the thing your whole system has been organized to prevent, and telling you to do it is like telling somebody afraid of water to swim a lake.

Ask one person to sit with you and do six.

Not to open them for you. To be in the room, with the kettle on, while you open six, and then to stop, whatever is in them, and talk about something else.

The presence is the whole mechanism. What has made this unbearable is not the paper, it is that every envelope has been opened alone in a hallway by somebody with nobody to turn to at the end of the sentence.

You were not meant to be doing this on your own. Scripture says two are better than one, for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves an ordinary friend into a hallway on an ordinary Tuesday.