The Morning Of The Court Date

The shoes are by the door and they are the wrong kind of clean.

He polished them at eleven o'clock the night before, sitting on the bottom stair with the tin open and the cloth going round and round long after the leather had stopped needing it. Not because the shoes were dirty. Because polishing is something a person can do with their hands at eleven o'clock at night when the rest of them has nowhere to go. The folder is on the hall table with a green tab marking the third page. The shirt is over the back of the chair, and the sleeves have been pressed twice.

Now it is ten past five in the morning, an hour and a half before he has to be anywhere, and he is sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet not yet on the floor.

That is the part nobody photographs. Not the room with the strip lighting and the plastic chairs. The edge of the bed. The narrow strip of cold carpet between his heels and the whole day, and the odd private certainty that if he does not put his feet down, the day cannot properly begin.

You know that strip of carpet. Maybe yours is the morning of a scan result. Maybe it is the morning the letters are handed out at work, or the morning a stranger who has never met your family gets forty minutes to decide how it will be arranged from now on. Something about your life is going to be settled today by people who will go home afterwards and think about their dinner. You have rehearsed your sentences. You have rehearsed theirs. You have run the version where it goes well so many times that it has worn thin and stopped comforting you, and you have run the other version until your stomach learned it by heart.

And your body has already made its decision about today. It decided somewhere around four o'clock. Shoulders up. Jaw set. Breath held high in the chest where it does no good. Braced.

Back on the edge of the bed, he does something he has done since he was small, so worn down by use that it hardly counts as praying. He says four words into a dark bedroom. Lord, go before me.

Nothing in the room changes. The light does not shift. The shoes are still by the door.

What changes is the order. He is no longer the first one through that door today.

You are not the one who walks in first

There is a day in Scripture that is entirely about a handover. An old man of a hundred and twenty is standing in front of a whole nation saying, out loud, that he is not going with them. Everything they are about to walk into, they walk into without him. And a younger man named Joshua is standing there being handed a room he did not choose, on a morning he did not pick, with the outcome not written anywhere he can read it.

What Moses says to him is not be brave and it will go your way. Nobody promises Joshua an easy campaign. What he is given is an order of entry.

It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.Deuteronomy 31:8

Read it slowly, because it is built in three movements and each one is doing a different job.

He goes before you. Ahead. Into the room, into the corridor, into the conversation, before your shoes ever touch the floor of it.

He is with you. Not behind a screen. Not watching from somewhere spiritual and far away. In the chair beside yours, in the queue at the door, in the twenty minutes that go on for an hour.

He does not let go of you and does not forsake you. Which is a promise about the afterwards. About the car park. About the drive home whatever is in your hand when you walk out.

Notice what is not there. There is no guarantee about how the day lands. I will not hand you one either, and I would be careful of anyone who does, because that is a promise nobody was given permission to make and you are the one who would carry the wreckage of it. What you are handed is better than a forecast. You are handed company that arrives first.

Braced and held are two different things a body can do, and they feel different from the inside. Bracing is what a body does when it is expecting impact and there is nobody beside it. Every muscle takes a turn on the watch. Held is what a body does when there is a hand flat on its back. The impact might still come. But the weight of it is no longer landing on one set of shoulders that have been awake since four.

And this is not a story about what God used to do for men in sandals. He still walks into ordinary rooms. Rooms with a water cooler and a laminated notice. He is not too large for a Tuesday, and He is not somewhere else this morning because your situation is administrative rather than dramatic. He goes ahead of people in corridors constantly, and almost nobody sees it happen, because the going ahead does not make a sound.

It is for you personally, this morning, in the state you are actually in. Not for the calm version of you who slept. He goes before the one sitting on the edge of the bed with a dry mouth. That is the only version of you there is today, and He is not waiting for a better one.