Underneath Are The Everlasting Arms

Both thumbs on the crack. That is the whole technique.

You come up under it with your fingers spread wide, you press both thumbs along the split, and then you walk slowly and you do not turn a corner at any speed. Four steps from the table to the counter. She has done it every night for two winters.

The bowl was her grandmother's, and it went into the sink one evening and came out in two pieces, and she glued it at the kitchen table with the light on until half past one in the morning. The glue holds. It holds beautifully, as long as nothing ever tests it.

She has four other bowls. Perfectly good ones, none of them cracked, one of them nicer. The fruit could go in any of them.

It goes in that one. Every night she carries it back to the counter with both thumbs on the split, and she has never once allowed herself to sit down and think about what she would do if it went.

You have been carrying something like that, and it is not a bowl.

Your faith is intact. Nobody looking at you would say otherwise, and you have not gone anywhere and you have not stopped, and every morning you get up and you do it again. And you have been holding it with both thumbs since the last time somebody walked out of your life, because somewhere in the last two years you worked out that you are the only thing standing between this and the floor.

And underneath all of it sits the sentence you would never say out loud. Even if I found people. Even if a door opened and there were faces in it. I would lose them, the way I have lost everybody else, and then I would be doing this again from further down.

Underneath is a position, not a feeling

Moses is at the end of his life. He is not preaching. He is blessing, tribe by tribe, out loud, over a whole people who are about to go on without him, and in the middle of it he says this.

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

Now look at where the arms are, because the preposition is doing all the work and almost nobody stops on it.

They are not around. Around would be an embrace, and an embrace is a beautiful thing and also a thing you can be let out of. You can wriggle in an embrace. You can wonder whether it is still there. An embrace has a felt quality to it, which means on a bad night, when you feel nothing at all, you can reasonably conclude that it has ended.

Underneath is a completely different job. Underneath is what a floor does. A floor does not hold you closer, it holds you up, and it does its entire work whether or not you are thinking about it, and it does not require you to hold on back. Nobody has ever gripped a floor. You have never once in your life had to concentrate in order to keep a floor underneath you.

And the word Moses uses for refuge in the same breath is the word for a dwelling, a den, the place a creature goes when it has nothing left in it. Not a fortress you defend from the walls. A place you crawl into and stop.

You are standing on something that is not your own grip, and it has been under you for two years. Deuteronomy 33:27 says underneath rather than around, in writing, and the Spirit of God has been holding that position for the whole of the time you believed you were the one doing the holding.

I want to say something about the will, because I am not about to call it a mistake.

The white-knuckled two years were not unbelief and they were not pride. That is what faithfulness looks like from the inside when everything else has gone: it looks like a woman with both thumbs on a crack, walking slowly, refusing to put the thing down. There is nothing to be ashamed of anywhere in it. It just was never structural. You were gripping. You were not carrying.

What is settled, and what is not

Now the sentence you would not say out loud, and I am going to handle it honestly rather than comfortably.

You said that even if you found people, you would lose them. I am not going to answer that by promising you people. I will not tell you that a door is about to open, or that there is somebody on their way, or that this year is going to be different. I do not know that, nobody does, and a promise like that is a lovely thing to read on a Tuesday and a cruel thing to remember in November.

Here is what is actually settled, and it is more than the other thing would have been.

God keeps His people. Not their momentum, not their circle, not their good years. Them. Scripture says He is able to keep you from falling, and puts it as a plain statement about His capacity rather than as encouragement about yours. Jesus said of His own that nobody plucks them out of His hand, and then said the Father's hand is around that one, so that there are two hands in it and neither of them is yours.

You have been kept, and the keeping was never yours to do. Scripture says God is able to keep you from falling, set down as a fact about Him rather than a compliment to you, and His Spirit is the hold that has never once depended on the strength of yours.

And notice who Moses was talking to. He was not leaning over one person's shoulder. He was blessing tribes, a whole people, out loud, at the end of his life, and the everlasting arms in that sentence are underneath all of them at once. Which is the part that answers your November. Your place among God's people is not a private arrangement you renew by effort. It is a corporate keeping you were put inside of.

You are inside a keeping spoken over a whole people, and your grip was never what fastened it. Deuteronomy 33:27 is the close of a blessing over tribes rather than over one person, and the Holy Spirit set you inside the plural of it.