Boards and Clocks and a Tin of Biscuits

Nine boards out, seven in use, and the clocks are a mixture of two mechanical ones from the seventies and the rest digital, and there is an unresolved cultural dispute about this that surfaces about twice a year.

Thursdays, seven till ten, a community center hall that smells faintly of a Zumba class. There is a tin of biscuits that somebody's wife refills without being asked and that has never once been formally acknowledged. There is a boy of thirteen who is going to be much better than any of them within two years and who is being coached about this with a mixture of pride and grief.

He is on board four. He has been coming since the club was in the other hall, which is eleven years.

He is a decent player. Solid. Never brilliant, never embarrassing. And there is one thing about his game that only one other man in that room has ever noticed, and that man has never said anything, because you do not.

There is a move he does not play.

It comes up perhaps three times a season. It is the strongest move on the board when it comes up and he sees it every time and he plays something else, always something sound, always something defensible. Because that move opens a line, and the line is sharp, and if it goes wrong there is no way back, and he has decided at some point that he is not a man who can hold that kind of position.

He plays the whole rest of his life exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason, and the reason is one thing about him that nobody in that hall knows.

Sit down opposite me for a minute and let me say the sentence that matters most before anything else. I am not going to ask you to tell anybody. Not tonight, not eventually, not as a stronger version of yourself. I will not guess what it is and I will not offer you a list. Nothing here wants the thing itself, and a man who never tells another living person is a whole man and a whole reader of this site.

The gentlest verse in the book, and where it sits

Nahum is three chapters long and it is about a city coming down. It is not a comfortable book. People do not put it on cards.

And sitting in the middle of the first chapter, with the hardest material on either side of it, is this.

The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.Nahum 1:7

Notice where it is. Not at the end, as a consolation once the difficult part is over. In the middle. Surrounded. The shelter is placed inside the trouble rather than after it, and that is a decision somebody made about how to arrange a book.

You are given a stronghold in the day of trouble rather than after it, and you were never being asked to wait until the position resolves. I am not offering you a comforting selection. The written word puts that verse exactly there on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page and puts it into a man on board four with a move he will not play.

What kind of knowing that is

Now the last clause, because it is the one that matters for a man carrying something unspoken.

He knoweth them that trust in him.

In Hebrew that verb is not the verb for holding information. It is the word used of a shepherd and his own animals, of a person and their household. It is a knowing that includes recognizing, claiming, and taking responsibility for.

Which means the sentence is not a warning. It is not He knows all about you, so be careful. It is the opposite. In a chapter about a city being dismantled, the thing that marks out the people who are not going down with it is that God knows them the way a man knows his own.

So the knowing that has frightened you is the very thing that is holding you.

You are known by God the way a shepherd knows his own, and you were claimed rather than catalogued. That is what the written word does with that verb in that verse, and it is His Spirit who turns a knowing that felt like a searchlight into a knowing that feels like a hand on a shoulder.

The move and the position

And now back to board four, because there is one more thing.

You have arranged your entire game around a position you believe you could not hold. That is not cowardice and I will not have it called that. It is a judgment about your own resources, made a long time ago, under pressure, and it has been running unexamined ever since because it has never been tested.

But the verse does not say you hold the position. It says God is the stronghold. The Hebrew there is a fortified height, a place that holds, and it is not a description of you.

A man does not have to be able to hold a sharp line if he is not the one holding it.

You are being held by a fortified place that was never your own construction, and you were never the wall. Scripture calls Him our refuge and our fortress in the same breath, and it is His Spirit, not your assessment of your own resources, who does the holding on a Thursday evening.