The Dark Between the House and the Barn

It is sixty one steps from our back door to the barn door and I have counted it more than once.

In the daytime it is nothing. I do it about forty times a day and I do it without noticing I have done it, and if you asked me at four in the afternoon how far the barn was I would say it was just there.

At half past nine at night it is a different distance. I do not know how to explain that to a grown-up who has forgotten it, except to say that the sixty one steps are still sixty one steps and they are not the same.

The bit that does it is between the water trough and the corner of the shed, which is about eleven steps long, and it is dark there because the house light stops and the barn light has not started, and there is a gap in the middle where a person is not in either one.

I have to go out there at night sometimes because the lamp in the calf stall needs checking and that is one of my jobs and I asked for it.

What I do is this. I stand at the back door and I look at the barn light and I say out loud, not loudly, that I am doing it now. And then I do it, and I do it fast, and I am not going to pretend I walk.

Bucky comes about half the time. He does not come to be kind, because that is not in him, he comes because he thinks somebody going to a barn at night might have a bucket. But he is there, and he does not care about the dark at all, and having something beside me that has no opinion about the dark turns out to help more than I expected and is not the same as not being scared.

Dad has never once offered to come with me. I have thought about that a lot and I think it is on purpose and I think it is because he knows I asked for the job.

The word is when and not if

David writes six words that a child can carry for a lifetime, and the important word is at the front.

What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. (Psalm 56:3)

What time I am afraid. When, not if. He does not write, if I should ever become afraid, which would be a sentence written by somebody managing an image. He writes it as a scheduled and expected condition.

And he was not a timid man. This is the psalm written when he was taken by his enemies in a foreign city, and the man writing it had killed a giant in a valley some years earlier and is here recording, in writing, for everybody, that he was frightened.

You are living inside a verse that expects the fear rather than forbidding it, and Psalm 56:3 uses when instead of if. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as permission rather than as a low expectation.

That matters at nine years old more than almost anything else in this category, because the whole trouble with being told to be brave is that it sounds like being told not to be frightened, and no child can produce that on demand.

You have not been asked to stop being afraid before you move. The written word puts trusting and being afraid in the same short sentence without any conflict between them, and His Spirit is what makes two things being true at once possible in a body at a back door.

Where the trusting goes

The next verse tells you what he does with it, and it is not a feeling either.

In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me. (Psalm 56:4)

I will praise his word. That is the object. Not his rescue, which had not happened, and not his plan, which David did not know. The specific thing being leaned on is something God had said.

Which makes trust a thing with a handle on it. There is a sentence somewhere that God said, and a frightened person takes hold of that particular sentence, and that is the whole mechanism.

You are able to take hold of something specific rather than trying to feel something general. Psalm 56:4 names the word as the object of the trusting, and the Spirit of God is what makes a sentence something a person can actually grip.

And the psalm ends with a detail that is one of the tenderest in the whole book: thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle.

You have been kept track of at a level nobody would think to ask for. Psalm 56:8 has somebody counting steps and keeping tears, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a psalm into eleven dark steps between a trough and a shed.