She Keeps Moving To Stay Ahead Of It

She is up at five and she does not properly sit down until eleven at night.

People tell her she is disciplined. Women at church say it admiringly and mean it as a compliment, and she takes it graciously, and it is not true.

She knows exactly what it is, and she has known for about four years.

The thinking starts the second she stops.

Not gradually. Immediately. She can sit down in a chair with a cup of tea, entirely fine, and by the time the tea is cool enough to drink there is a whole conversation running in her head that she did not start and cannot end, and it goes to the same three places every time, and she knows the route so well now that she can feel it beginning before it begins.

So she does not sit down.

She has never once described it that way to another human being. If you asked her why she is always on the go she would tell you about the house, and the family, and the way the mornings work, and every fact in that answer would be accurate.

What is actually happening is that she is outrunning something, one job at a time, from five in the morning until eleven at night.

Her sister came over on a Sunday and said sit down. She said in a minute. Her sister said no, now, and reached over and took the cloth out of her hand, and put it on the arm of the sofa, and sat down next to her.

She sat down. And her leg started going, the way it does.

And her sister did not say anything at all about it. She just put her hand on her knee and left it there, and they sat like that for about twenty minutes, and it was the first twenty minutes in four years that she had been sat down and not alone in her own head.

She has thought about that hand every day since.

If sitting down is when it starts for you, come and take the good chair. Somebody is already in the room.

The man who talked to his own soul out loud

There is a verse where a man does something slightly odd and completely practical. He turns and addresses himself.

Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.Psalm 116:7

He is not describing his soul. He is speaking to it, in the second person, out loud, and he is telling it where to go.

And look at what he does not say. He does not tell his soul to calm down. He does not tell it that the thoughts are unreasonable, or that it should be ashamed of itself, or that a person with his history has no business being restless.

He gives it somewhere to return to, and then he gives it a reason, and the reason is not about his own capacity at all. The Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.

You are permitted to speak to your own soul the way that man did, and telling it where to go is not the same as telling it off. Psalm 116:7 hands a restless soul a destination and a reason in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit kept the reason grounded in what God has done rather than in what the person can manage, which means the chair you have been avoiding has something waiting in it besides the thinking.

What the moving is actually doing

Let us be honest about the strategy, because it has been working, and that is exactly the problem.

Staying in front of it works. Every day it works. From five in the morning until eleven at night, the thing does not catch you, and there is a real relief in that, and nobody in your life has any idea it is happening.

It is also costing you sixteen hours a day and it never ends, because you cannot outrun a thing that lives in the same house.

You have been carrying a fear alone at speed, and nothing anywhere in Scripture asks a person to manage it that way. 1 Peter 5:7 says casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you, and it is written as a handing over rather than as an outpacing, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Comforter, which means the strategy you built in the absence of anybody knowing was never the one on offer.

Nothing here is a rebuke of the running. It kept you upright for four years. It is simply not the only thing available, and it never was.

Commanded, so it is not a reward for being calm

Here is the piece that matters most for a woman in your particular position.

The stopping is not conditional on being at peace first. That is the trap. You have been waiting, without knowing you were waiting, for a quiet enough head to make sitting down safe, and that day keeps not arriving. The rest sits in the commandments. It is grounded in a people who had been slaves and were not any more, and it was given to them before any of them felt settled, because it is what made them not slaves rather than what they got for feeling free.

You are allowed to stop while your head is still going, and the allowing was never made to wait on your calm. Deuteronomy 5:15 grounds the whole commandment in a people brought out with a mighty hand rather than in a people who had finished feeling anxious, and it is the Spirit of the Lord who brings liberty where He is, which is why sitting down tonight with a leg that will not keep still is obedience and not pretending.