Ten Past Ten in Your Own Kitchen

Ten past ten was when the doors went.

Nobody had ever written that down. It was simply how it was. The welcome table got folded away, somebody at the back pushed the double doors to, and whatever you were in the middle of saying, you stopped saying it and found your seat.

Adaeze knew that in her body long before she knew it in her head. Eleven years of the third row on the left. Near enough the aisle to get out for the children's talk, far enough in that nobody could put a hand on her shoulder from behind. Eleven years of arriving at nine forty, because ten past ten was already too late to be arriving.

She has not been inside that building since the February before last.

That is eighteen months. She worked it out once on her fingers, standing at the sink, and then wished she had not, because a number makes a thing real in a way a feeling never quite does.

And here is what she cannot explain to anybody, herself included.

On a Sunday morning, in her own kitchen, in a dressing gown, with the radio on and a coffee going cold beside her and nothing whatsoever required of her by anyone alive, at about ten past ten, her shoulders come up.

Not a lot. An inch. The way they would if somebody had quietly opened a door behind her.

She is not sitting there remembering. That is the part that undoes her. She is looking at the garden, or reading something on her phone, and her body files the time all by itself and does the old thing it used to do. Shoulders up. Jaw set. That fast small read of the room she used to run from the third row, working out who was in this week, who was watching, what the temperature was, whether today was going to be one of the good Sundays.

There is nobody in the room. There is a kitchen, a kettle, and a chair with a cardigan over the back of it.

At about twenty past, without her noticing that either, her shoulders come down again.

She has never said this out loud to a single human being, because there is no way of saying it that does not sound ridiculous. Nothing is happening to her. Nobody is shouting. Nobody has spoken an unkind word to her in a year and a half. She is safe.

She has been safe for eighteen months.

And every Sunday at ten past ten, her body, which was there, and which remembers what her mouth has stopped saying, gets ready.

Your body kept the timetable

I want to say the plainest thing first, before anything else, because there is every chance you've half been waiting for somebody to say the opposite.

Nothing is wrong with you.

A body that braces at ten past ten on a Sunday is a body that was paying close attention. It learned a room. It learned which weeks the tone changed, and what the air felt like just before a hard word came, and which face across the aisle told you what kind of morning this would be. It learned all of that because learning it was how a person gets through eleven years. That is not weakness and it is nothing to do with the size of anyone's faith. It is a watchman standing on a wall, keeping a watch nobody has come out and ended.

So hear the word of God to a person standing precisely there.

Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.Psalm 46:10

Read the two lines that follow the stillness, because most of us were only ever handed the first four words. I will be exalted. Twice, and about everything. The stillness of Psalm 46 is not a mood and it is not a technique for a quiet mind. It is a command spoken inside a psalm about mountains sliding into the sea, and the reason given for it is that God settles the outcome of the shaking, not the woman in the third row. So the watch is off you. You are stood down, and the One who never once needed you on that wall is the One saying it, and His Spirit is the one carrying it into a kitchen at ten past ten.

There is a difference between a room ending and a body being told the room has ended. The first happened in February. The second has not happened yet. It does not happen on its own, and it does not happen because enough Sundays pile up behind it. It happens when somebody with the standing to say so says it out loud.

You were never given a form on the way out of that building with a date on it by which you were supposed to have unclenched. Nobody handed you a schedule. What was written instead, and written long before you were born, is that the Lord of hosts is with us and the God of Jacob is our refuge, and Psalm 46 says it twice, once on either side of the stillness, like two hands holding a sentence still. The Holy Spirit does not read your Sundays as a report card. He reads that psalm over you.

What ten past ten actually was

Look properly at the moment your shoulders move, because it is not the fear of anything.

It is a job.

At ten past ten you used to start working. Reading faces. Guessing the mood. Deciding what would be safe to say in the foyer afterwards and what would not be. Holding a room together in your own chest so that it stayed bearable for you and often for other people too. Nobody asked you to do it. You did it because somebody had to and you did the noticing.

And a person can leave a building and carry the job out with them under their coat.

Here is what Scripture does with that job. Psalm 46 opens with God as a very present help in trouble and closes with Him as a stronghold, and in between the earth gives way and the waters roar and not one line of it asks the singer to hold anything up. You have a place inside that psalm and it is not the wall. It is the city with the river running through it, gladdened, held, kept by somebody else, and the Spirit of God is the one who fills that city rather than a woman who learned to read faces at speed.

That is the exchange the Spirit is offering on a Sunday morning. Not a nicer feeling. A different job description.