Two Verses And A Floor

The power went out at ten forty and the hail started about four minutes later.

Ada got the kids into the hallway because the hallway is the only part of that house with no windows in it, and she put the flashlight standing on its end so the light went up and spread across the ceiling instead of into anybody's eyes. The quilt off the back of the couch. The battery radio on the floor by her knee, turned down low, saying county names.

The hail came in waves. It would let up enough that you thought it was done, and then it would come again like somebody throwing gravel by the bucket at the roof.

The younger one wanted to know if the house was going to be all right.

And Ada, who has not been anywhere on a Sunday in a long time and who has not talked about any of that with anybody, opened her mouth and said a verse.

Not chosen. It just came. She said it the way you say something you learned before you knew you were learning it, and then when the hail came again she said it once more, and then she said the other one.

That is what she had. Two.

She said those two verses on the floor of that hallway for about an hour and a half. In between them she said ordinary things. It is loud but the roof is doing fine. Scoot over here. No, that is the neighbor's gutter. Then the hail would take another run at the house and the two verses would come back around, low, on the exhale, over the top of two children under a quilt.

The older one fell asleep. The little one did not, but she got quiet, and somewhere past midnight she put her head on Ada's leg and stayed.

The storm went east. The radio said the county names in a different order. Ada sat on that floor another twenty minutes after it was over, because the kids were finally still and her back was against the wall and she did not want to move yet.

The power came on at four in the morning and woke the whole house up with the microwave beeping.

And that is when the other thing arrived.

Standing in the kitchen at four in the morning, hitting buttons on a microwave, Ada thought: that was all I had. Two. A woman my age. Two verses, and I said them ninety times because there was not a third one behind them.

She got the kids back into their beds. She stood in the hall a minute and looked at the flashlight still standing on its end on the floor, burning down, pointed at nothing now.

Two, she thought. That is not a faith. That is what is left of one.

Two is not the wreckage of ten

I want to go straight at the thought that hit her in the kitchen, because it is the whole reason you are reading this.

The thought is not really about the number. The thought is that a small holding proves a large collapse, and that anybody looking at you would see the collapse first. So the two verses stop feeling like a rescue and start feeling like an inventory of damage.

Now look at what the psalmist asks for, because it is not more.

Uphold me according unto thy word, that I may live: and let me not be ashamed of my hope.Psalm 119:116

Uphold me according unto thy word. He does not ask for a bigger stack. He asks the word he already has to hold him up, and then, in the same breath, he asks not to be ashamed of the hope he is holding, which tells you the shame was already in the room when he wrote it.

So take this where you are. You are being upheld right now, and it is not by the size of what you can recite. Psalm 119:116 is where that is written down. His Spirit put an unashamed prayer in the mouth of a man who asked for nothing except to be held, and He has hold of you while you count. The count is not what is doing it.

Here is a thing about weight that a floor knows and a person forgets.

A floor does not hold you a little because it is small. A hallway floor is maybe three feet across and it held a woman, two children, a quilt, a flashlight and a radio for an hour and a half without one thought about how narrow it was. Narrow is not weak. Narrow is narrow. The two are different measurements entirely, and fear runs them together on purpose.

You are standing on something that took the whole weight of a bad night. His word says it upholds, and it upheld, and the Holy Spirit was in that hallway saying two verses through a woman who did not plan to say anything. Whatever else got lost, that is the report from the ground.

Now I want to be careful with you, because there is a comfortable thing to say here and it would be a lie.

I am not telling you the rest is coming back. I do not know that. Nobody who tells you that knows it, and a promise God has not made is not made kinder by being said gently. Some of what went is gone in this life, and pretending otherwise would ask you to spend today waiting instead of standing.

And this does not get called a stage on the way to something bigger, either. That is the same trick in a nicer coat. It tells you what you have now is a waiting room. It is not a waiting room. It is a floor, and it is holding, and it was holding at midnight with the hail coming down.

Nobody here is going to suggest that your two verses got to be two because you did not have enough faith. That is false and it always was. Psalm 119 was written by somebody asking to be held, not by somebody with a full shelf, and the Holy Spirit put his asking in the book so that yours would not sound like failure to you.

You have exactly what you need to stand today. That is not a smaller version of a promise, it is the promise, written plainly, and it is His Spirit and not your inventory keeping your feet under you this morning.