Out Is Very Open

Somebody said the air would help, so you have walked up to the top field, and now you are standing in the middle of it and it is unbearable.

Not frightening in a way you could name. There is nothing here. It is a Tuesday afternoon, the grass is dry, a dog is barking a long way off, and there is no threat anywhere in any direction, and that is exactly the problem, because the openness has come at you from all sides at once and there is nothing to put your back against.

You notice that you have been drifting toward the hedge. You have made it about forty feet without deciding to, and you stop, and you make yourself stand still where you are, and you last maybe nine seconds before your shoulders start turning you again.

Here is what nobody warned you about.

The thing that had you is over. It is genuinely over, and everyone knows it is over, and several people have said the word finally to you in a warm voice. And under all of that, in a place you would not say out loud, you have been thinking about how much smaller everything used to be.

Because there were walls. There was a routine, even if the routine was terrible. There were phone calls that had to be made by four o'clock, and a version of you who knew exactly what she was doing at any given hour, and a shape to the day that came from the outside and did not have to be invented. Constraint is horrible. Constraint is also orientation, and you did not know that until it was taken off you.

Now the day is enormous and the field is enormous and nobody is telling you where to stand, and the freedom has arrived with no instructions in the box.

And there is a sentence you keep almost saying, and you would rather chew glass than say it to any of the people who helped: I do not know how to be a person who is out.

You get to the hedge. You put your back against it. It is a scrappy old hedge, half hawthorn and half wire, and it is the best thing that has happened all afternoon, and you stand there with your shoulders against it and you look out at the field, which is beautiful, which is bright, and which you cannot walk into.

The largeness was the point

There is a line in Psalm 18 that most people read straight past on their way to the dramatic parts, and it is the most practical sentence in the psalm for anyone standing at the edge of a field.

He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.Psalm 18:19

David has just spent fifteen verses describing thunder, smoke, hailstones, an earth that shook, and a hand reaching down and taking hold of him out of many waters. And then the rescue lands, and the place it lands in is not described as safe, or small, or comfortable. It is described as large.

That word is not an accident and it is not a nice ending. The largeness is the deliverance. Psalm 18:19 puts the size of the place in the same sentence as the getting out, and the Holy Spirit has left it there for three thousand years for people who have discovered that wide is its own kind of hard.

So the thing you cannot walk into is not evidence of a failed rescue. You are standing in the shape that rescue actually has, and it is written that He brought His man forth into exactly this, with the same Spirit who did the bringing out standing in the open beside you.

And notice the reason given at the end of the verse, because it answers the second question, the one that never gets asked out loud. He delivered me, because he delighted in me. Not because the man was ready. Not because he had a plan for the field. The reason sits entirely on God's side of the sentence.

Now, the honest part, which a lot of encouraging writing skips.

Nobody is telling you this is easy, and nobody is putting a date on it. The after is not a victory lap; it is a whole new set of skills being learned by somebody who is exhausted, and the people who love you have mostly moved on to being pleased for you, which is lovely and which leaves you learning to stand in the open on your own. You have not been given a deadline for this by anyone in Scripture, and the Spirit of God does not run recovery on a schedule that anybody publishes.

Which is also why I want to say this next part plainly, because the after is exactly where people quietly go back in. If it gets dark enough that you find yourself thinking everyone would have an easier time without you, tell one living human being today. Whoever is nearest: a friend, your doctor, the person you rang at four o'clock for a year. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, emergency services or the crisis line where you live. You are not a burden for that and it is not a failure of faith. His word hands real rescue to real people on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is not less present in a phone call than in a field.