The Voice on the Other End

The same words open every page on this site. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing here is treatment, and nothing on this page ever stands in for a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. This page has one purpose, which is a phone call. If the call is yours, make it before you reach the end of this.

Now. I want to name the exact moment, because I think nobody has named it for you.

It is not the appointment. It is not the waiting room. It is not even what somebody might eventually say.

It is the two or three seconds after a stranger says hello. That is the whole cliff. Somebody picks up, and there is a silence with your name in it, and you have to produce a sentence in a voice that is going to come out wrong.

And because the thing you dread is so small, you cannot say it to anybody. It sounds ridiculous when spoken aloud. And so a genuinely frightened person is now alone with a fear she has decided is too silly to mention, which is the loneliest arrangement there is.

He wrote the sentence in the order it actually happens

There is a line in the Psalms that I love for a technical reason, which is the order of the two halves.

What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. (Psalm 56:3, King James Version)

The fear comes first in the sentence. Not chronologically after the trusting. First.

He does not write, when I have dealt with my fear, then I will trust. He writes what time I am afraid, which means at the very hour, in the middle of it, with the fear fully present and unresolved.

You are permitted to do this afraid, and the trusting has never once required the fear to leave first. Psalm 56:3 puts the being afraid and the trusting inside the same moment rather than in sequence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a frightened person stop waiting for a different condition.

That order matters more than almost anything else I could tell you. Everybody has been waiting for the readiness. The readiness is not a stage that arrives. It is a thing some people wait for their entire lives while a phone sits on a counter.

You have been waiting for a state that has never once been promised to anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who acts inside a person's fear rather than after it, and it is written that the trusting happens at the very time of being afraid.

The small fear is a real fear

Let me say something about size, because I think this is where it has gone wrong.

A fear is not measured by how reasonable it sounds. It is measured by whether it stops somebody, and this one has stopped you for weeks, which makes it a large fear regardless of its subject.

And the habit of calling it silly is not helping. It adds a second problem on top of the first, which is a private low grade contempt for yourself, and nobody has ever once been moved forward by that.

You are dealing with something real, and the size of the subject has never once determined the size of the fear. Psalm 56:3 makes no attempt to evaluate whether the fear was proportionate, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes contempt out of somebody's own account of themselves.

I have known people to walk into hard rooms with great courage and be unable to ring a stranger. There is no contradiction there. That is just how fear distributes itself in a person, and it does not follow the rules anybody would design.

You were never badly made, and the fear landing on this particular thing has never once been a fault line in you. The Spirit of God is the one who is gentle with a person about the shape of their own fear, and what is written pairs the being afraid with the trusting and evaluates neither.

The plain routing, which is a two minute conversation

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and it is the only thing I am actually asking.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and the two or three seconds of dread do not apply, because that call is answered by somebody whose whole job is exactly this. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and it is a real person. And the appointment goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, by telephone, in whatever voice comes out.

You are allowed to sound exactly as frightened as you feel, and no receptionist has ever once minded. Psalm 56:3 has a man name his fear in the same breath as his trust and nobody edits it out of the book, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the three seconds after somebody says hello.

One more practical thing. If speaking is the hard part, many clinics take a message another way now. That counts. Nobody has ever said the trusting has to be done out loud.

You have more than one door available, and the passage has never once specified which one a frightened person has to use. The Spirit of God is the one who gets somebody through a door of any kind, and what is written puts the trust inside the hour of the fear rather than on the far side of it.