There Is Water Where Water Should Not Be

You touch it with the back of your hand, low down, near the baseboard, on the left.

The back of the hand because it is more sensitive, which you learned from your grandmother about a completely different thing, and it has become the way you do this.

Six times yesterday. You know it was six because you counted in the evening, and counting it was worse than any individual time had been.

It is about the size of a dinner plate and it is on the outside wall in the corner behind where the chair was, and you moved the chair three weeks ago so you could see it properly and you have not moved the chair back.

And the thing you have not told anybody, including your wife who lives in this house, is how much of your day that corner takes up.

You think about it in the truck. You think about it in meetings. You come home and you speak to your family and you make the dinner and somewhere in the first twenty minutes you go into that room and you put the back of your hand on a wall and you stand there for four seconds.

And then you come out and nobody has noticed and you do not say anything.

The checking is not information

Let me describe what the touching is actually producing, because I think you believe it is producing data and it is not.

Damp does not move on the timescale of four hours. Whatever is behind that wall is doing what it is doing over weeks. The difference between how it felt this morning and how it feels tonight is almost entirely the temperature of your hand and how much you want it to be different.

So the six times a day are not six measurements. They are one measurement taken once and then repeated, and the repetition tells you nothing at all.

You have been gathering the same fact six times a day, and none of that touching has ever once told you anything the first time did not. It is written in Nahum 1 that the Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in that room while a man puts the back of his hand on a wall.

And now let me name what the touching is for, because it is doing something, just not what you think.

It is a way of keeping the thing under your own management. As long as the checking continues, the wall is being attended to. The moment it stops, the damp becomes a thing happening in your house without you, and that is unbearable.

So the touching is not diagnosis. It is custody.

You have been holding custody of something you cannot actually hold, and six checks a day has never once been the same as having it in hand. Nahum 1 calls the Lord a strong hold in the day of trouble, and the Spirit of God is the one who is the holding rather than asking you to be it.

He knoweth them that trust in him

Here is the verse, and the book it comes from makes it stronger.

The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him. (Nahum 1:7, King James Version)

Nahum is a hard book. It is mostly about a city coming down, and it is not gentle, and this verse sits in the middle of it like a window.

A strong hold. A fortified place. Somewhere a person goes and is held rather than doing the holding.

And notice the second half, which is the part that gets skipped: he knoweth them that trust in him. That is not a threat and it is not a condition. It is a statement that the ones who lean on Him are known to Him personally, by sight, individually.

You are known by name to the one who is the strong hold, and no wall in your house has ever once been a thing you had to keep custody of alone. The written word calls Him a strong hold in the day of trouble, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows the man standing in that room at half past six.

And here is the part I want to press on, because it is the practical hinge.

A stronghold is a place with other people in it. Nobody defends a fortified place alone, and nobody has ever gone into one and stood in a room by himself touching a wall while everybody else carried on outside.

You have made this a solo occupation in a house with a family in it.

You are inside a house full of people and alone with one wall, and three weeks of not mentioning it has never once been the same as sparing anybody. Nahum 1 puts a strong hold and a personal knowing in the same sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who does not treat you as a garrison of one.