I Checked The Bag Nine Times

Nine times. You know it was nine because you counted at about the sixth.

The bag was fine every time. That is the part worth saying at the front. There was never a check where something turned out to be missing. Nine checks, nine confirmations, and the tenth would have confirmed it as well.

And then you got there, and you were not there. You were still at the front door, mentally, running through a list, and you spent the first hour of the day catching up with your own body.

You know it is not about the bag. That is why you are still reading. The bag is where a thing lands, and the thing itself is that some part of you cannot put the day down long enough to be in it.

And here is what nobody says about that, and it is why this is worth an article. Vigilance is not a fault. It is a skill, it works, and it is the reason this family functions.

It just has no off switch, and you have never been taught one, and you have started to notice that you are not present at your own family's good days.

Be still, and know

There is a command in the forty sixth Psalm that gets printed on things and is almost never read as an instruction, which is what it is.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. (Psalm 46:10, King James Version)

You have a command in the written word to be still, and no amount of being the person who holds this family together has ever once exempted you from it. Psalm 46:10 gives the stillness as an instruction rather than as a suggestion for people with spare time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that to a woman who counted nine checks.

Look at where that verse sits, because the context is the whole point. Read the Psalm from the beginning and it is not a peaceful scene. There are waters roaring, mountains being carried into the sea, nations raging, and the earth melting.

And in the middle of all of that, the instruction is: be still.

Not once the noise stops. Not when the arrangements are settled. In the middle of it, addressed to people standing in exactly the conditions that make stillness feel irresponsible.

You are able to be still in conditions that make stillness feel irresponsible, and no roaring in your week has ever once made the command inapplicable. It is written that the be still comes in a Psalm full of raging and melting, which is why it is not addressed to people with quiet lives, and the Spirit of God is what makes it possible in the middle of a Saturday.

And then the reason given, which is the release in it. Know that I am God. I will be exalted.

The stillness is not based on the situation being under control. It is based on somebody else being God, which is a fact that does not require your attention to remain true.

You are able to stop holding a thing that is being held by somebody else, and letting go of it has never once been the same thing as it being dropped. The Holy Spirit is the one who does that arithmetic in a person, and Psalm 46 puts the being still and the knowing in one clause.

The ninth check is not about the bag

Now the practical part, and it is about what a repeated check actually is.

The first check is information. It tells you something you did not know.

The second one tells you nothing, because nothing has changed. And the third, and the ninth, are not gathering information at all. They are doing something else, which is producing about forty seconds of relief each, and then the relief drains and the next one is needed.

That is why the ninth check does not settle it, and why the tenth would not either. It is not a question being answered. It is a feeling being managed.

You are able to stop answering a question that has already been answered, and nine confirmations has never once been what kept this family safe. The Spirit of God is what shows a person the difference between information and relief, and it is written be still, which is a command about a body rather than about a state of mind.

And here is why the stillness has to be physical, and this is the practical heart of the article. You cannot decide to feel calm. Nobody can. But you can sit down.

Being still, in that Psalm, is a posture before it is anything else. Stop. Cease. Let go. And a body that has sat down for twenty minutes without checking anything does something to the mind, in an order that runs the opposite way to the one you would expect.

You are able to put the body still first and let the rest follow, and doing it in that order has never once been you pretending to be calm. The Holy Spirit is the one who meets a person in a physical act rather than in a resolution, and Psalm 46:10 commands the stillness before it explains anything.

And one thing about your children, because it is worth knowing. They are not measuring whether the bag was right. They are, without knowing it, watching whether their mother is in the day. That is what a child reads, and it is the only thing they will remember.

Twenty minutes with nothing checked

So here is the assignment.

Sit down for twenty minutes on the next day out. And do not check anything.

Twenty minutes, sitting, in one place. Not walking around slowly. Sitting.

You are able to sit in one place for twenty minutes, and no part of the day has ever once required you to be upright to hold it. Psalm 46:10 gives the instruction as a posture, and the Spirit of God is with a woman putting her hands in her lap on a blanket.

And do not check anything. This is the part that will be genuinely hard, so here is how to handle it rather than fight it. When the impulse comes, and it will come about every ninety seconds at first, do not tell yourself the bag is fine. That is an argument, and arguments lose.

Instead, name one thing you can see. The color of something. What one of them is doing. Then let the impulse pass, and expect it back.

You are able to let an impulse arrive and pass without acting on it, and needing to do that eleven times has never once been a failure of the twenty minutes. It is written be still, and know that I am God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a person the eleventh time an impulse comes and goes.

And here is the promise this article can make, which is not that you will relax. It is that at some point in those twenty minutes you will actually be at your family's day, possibly for the first time in years, and you will know it while it is happening.