He Brought Me Up Also, and the Verse Has a Sequence in It

A woman told me she thinks nothing is happening, and then she described eighteen months in which a great deal had happened, and she did not hear herself do it.

That is not unusual. It is almost the rule.

She listed things while she was explaining why nothing had changed. She mentioned that she sleeps now, which she did not two years ago. She mentioned a person she talks to. She mentioned that she goes out on a Thursday, which was not true before.

And then she said: but nothing has actually changed.

I have learned to be careful with this, because there is a version of the response that is a kind of bullying. If I list her own sentences back at her too quickly, she will feel corrected and she will stop telling me things, and she will be right that I have not understood the weight of what remains.

But something is happening, and there is a verse about a pit that most people read as one event and that is actually four.

Four things, not one

Here is the verse everybody knows.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. (Psalm 40:2, King James Version)

Count them.

Brought up out of the pit. Out of the clay, which is a separate clause and a separate problem, because a person can be out of a hole and still have their feet in something that will not let them move.

Set my feet upon a rock. That is a third thing, and it is about ground rather than about position.

And established my goings, which is about walking, and is the last of the four.

Nobody experiences those as a single moment. They are stages, and there are long stretches between them, and a person somewhere in the middle of that sequence has every reason to say that nothing is happening, because from inside stage two nothing looks like rescue.

You are somewhere in a sequence rather than nowhere, and the verse itself has four separate stages in it (Psalm 40:2). The Spirit is the one who does the moving from one to the next at a pace nobody inside it can measure.

The verse before it says how long

And the line immediately before is the one that hardly ever gets quoted with it, and it is the honest one.

I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. (Psalm 40:1)

I waited patiently. The Hebrew there is stronger and stranger than the English, and it is closer to waiting I waited, which is a doubling used for intensity or for duration.

So the psalm that ends with feet on a rock begins with a long wait, and the writer puts them in the right order, and nobody quotes the first half on a card.

You are inside the first verse of that psalm rather than outside the second one (Psalm 40:1), and it is His Spirit who keeps a person waiting on God rather than merely waiting.

And Isaiah says something about how God handles somebody in the middle of this, and the image is deliberately fragile.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench. (Isaiah 42:3)

A smoking flax is a wick that has gone out and is still producing smoke. It is not burning. It is the least amount of fire a thing can have and still be said to have any, and the promise is specifically about not putting it out.

Why slow rescue is invisible from inside

There is a mechanical reason a person cannot see this, and it is worth knowing because it removes the self blame.

Change that happens slowly gets absorbed into the baseline. A person adjusts to their own improvement within about two weeks and then it stops registering as improvement, because it has become simply how things are.

Which means the very fact that a person cannot see the change is partly evidence that the change has been thoroughly absorbed.

That is a strange sentence and I want to be careful with it, because it can be used to talk somebody out of an accurate report. Sometimes nothing is happening, and a person saying so is right, and I have sat with people in exactly that.

So this is not an argument. It is only a suggestion that the instrument a person is using to measure this is not reliable, and that the unreliability runs in one specific direction.

You are using an instrument that reads low by design, and the psalm has four stages precisely because the middle ones do not feel like anything (Isaiah 42:3), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who does the work in a stretch that produces no readings at all.

And there is one healing in the Gospels that happens in two goes, and I have never been able to get past it.

And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. (Mark 8:24)

He is not healed yet. He is partly healed and he says so, and Jesus is not offended and does it again.

You are permitted to report a partial result out loud, and the man in that account said his plainly and was not rebuked for it (Mark 8:24). That work is the Spirit's, and He receives an honest half without treating it as ingratitude.

And this belongs here plainly, because this category reaches people in real danger. Where the situation has taken somebody to the place where being here at all has come into question, that is not a night to sit alone with. Tell a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.