Two Machines and a Queue of One

Twenty-two minutes on the spin and there is nowhere to go, because the machine on the left eats a coin about one time in four and it is not worth the risk of walking away.

So: a plastic chair, a noticeboard with a barbecue on it from two summers ago, a fire extinguisher, and a hand written sign about not overloading the dryers that has been laminated by somebody who owned a laminator and wanted the world to know.

There is one other woman in here, folding, from the van three down. They have talked about the weather and about the state of the shower block and about somebody's dog, and it has been perfectly pleasant, and now they have both run out and are companionably not talking, which is the best part of a laundry room.

And she is doing what she does. She is running the speech.

She has had it for six years. It has a beginning that starts calm, and a middle that explains the part people always get wrong, and an ending that is dignified, and she has revised it many times, and it is genuinely rather good. It is the speech she will give on the day the thing comes out.

That day has never come. Nobody is looking for it. There is no mechanism by which it would arrive. And she has rehearsed it in laundry rooms and car parks and at bus stops for six years, and it has cost her, at a conservative estimate, thousands of hours of her own life.

Sit down here on the other plastic chair with me, and let me say the sentence that matters most before anything else. I am not going to ask you to tell anybody. Not today, not one day, not as a braver version of yourself. I will not guess what it is and I will not offer you a list. Nothing in this wants the thing itself, and a woman who never tells another living person is a whole woman and a whole reader of this site.

The psalm names the thing you are actually afraid of

Most people who carry something unspoken are not, when you get down to it, afraid of God. You know where you stand with God, more or less, on a good day.

And you are not really afraid of the thing itself either. You have lived with it a long time.

What you are afraid of is talk. The version of it that would exist in other people's mouths. The shape it would take by the third telling. And there is a psalm that names exactly that and it uses a phrase that ought to be better known.

Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence from the pride of man: thou shalt keep them secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues.Psalm 31:20

The strife of tongues. Not the strife of enemies. Not the strife of consequences. Tongues.

David is not describing a persecution. He is describing being talked about, and he is putting it in the Scripture as a real danger that God covers people from, which means it is a real danger and you have not been silly.

You are covered from the strife of tongues by God Himself, and you were never being asked to survive a room on your own nerve. I am not offering you reassurance there. The written word names the exact fear and names the exact covering, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a woman on a plastic chair with a speech in her head.

A pavilion is a tent, and it goes where you go

Look at the word He uses for the covering, because it is not a fortress.

A pavilion is a tent. It is the sort of thing a king had pitched over him in the field, and the point of a tent is that it comes with you. It is not a place you retreat to and stay in. It is over you where you already are, in the field, in the middle of everything.

So this is not a promise that you will be moved somewhere no one talks. It is a promise of a covering in a laundry room, at a school gate, at a table where people are being people.

You are under a covering that travels with you, and you have it pitched over you today rather than at the end of a process. Scripture puts the pavilion in the field on purpose, and it is His Spirit, not your speech, who holds it up while you sit there.