Panic In A Full Room

The candles come out of the kitchen doors and the whole restaurant turns to look, and there are eleven people at this table and every one of them is singing, badly, and clapping on the wrong beat, and it is his fifty first birthday and this was her idea.

And she is going under.

It started somewhere around the main courses and she cannot say why, because there is no why. The room got further away first. Then the sound of it changed, the way sound changes when you go under water in a swimming pool, present but arriving late. Her hands have gone strange. Her chest is doing the thing where the breath goes in and nothing arrives, and she is having the thought she always has at this point, which is not I am going to die but something much more socially specific: do not do this here.

So she sings. She sings the last two lines of the song along with everybody else and she gets the words right and she smiles at the right moment and she puts her hands together for the photo.

Nobody notices. That is not a criticism of the eleven people. They are lovely and they love her and there is nothing on the outside of a person to see. She is sitting up straight with a napkin on her lap having what feels, from the inside, like the end of the world, and from the outside like a woman at a birthday.

Later, in the car, her husband says that was nice, wasn't it. And she says yes. It was nice.

Maybe yours is not a restaurant. Maybe it is a meeting, or a school gate, or the second hymn, or the queue in a shop that stopped moving. Maybe you have got very good at it. Some of the best people I know can go all the way down and back up again between one question and the next and answer the question correctly on the way past.

And here is the thing that makes it lonely rather than just frightening. It is not that nobody helped. It is that nobody could have known, so their not knowing is nobody's fault, and there is nowhere to put it.

Somebody could tell. Let me show you where that is written down.

He can tell the difference between a crowd and a hand

There is a scene in Mark where Jesus is on His way somewhere urgent, and the crowd around Him is not a polite crowd. The word the text uses is pressing. People are shoulder to shoulder, pushing in from every side, a body of noise and elbows moving down a street.

And in the middle of that, one woman who has been ill for twelve years, who has spent everything she had and got worse rather than better, reaches through the gap between two people and touches the edge of His clothes.

And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, Who touched my garments?Mark 5:30

His friends think the question is ridiculous, and they say so. Everybody is touching You. Look at them. You cannot possibly mean who touched You.

But He does mean it, and He is not confused, and this is the whole thing I want you to have.

He can tell the difference between contact and need.

A hundred people were touching Him. One person was reaching. Being surrounded is not the same as being reached, and it turns out the reaching registers. In a street full of shoving, with a crowd loud enough to bury anything, the quietest movement in the whole city was the one He stopped for.

So sit with that at your table for a second. Eleven people around you, none of whom can tell, and your hand under the tablecloth. He is not scanning the room for the loudest need. He is not waiting for you to be able to explain it, or to get somewhere private, or to compose a sentence with a verb in it. Your hand went out. He felt it.

And I want to say the other thing plainly, because you may have been carrying it a long while. This is not a failure of faith. It is not. Your chest tightening in a restaurant is not evidence about your spiritual condition, any more than a nosebleed is. Whoever told you that panic is what unbelief looks like was wrong, and they were wrong loudly, and I am sorry. God is not standing over you at that table with His arms folded. He is closer than the person next to you.

Which is why the dose for this hour has to be small. Not a chapter. Not a plan. Something you can take with your eyes shut, sitting still, in a room full of people, while the song is still going and everyone is still clapping on the wrong beat.

One hand. One breath. One name.

That is enough to reach with. It was enough in the street.