You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord, the Lord himself, is the Rock eternal.
Isaiah 26:3-4 (NIV)
A Mind That Stays Put
The crack runs up from the corner of the doorframe in steps, following the mortar, and it has been there two years. She has watched it go from the width of a hair to the width of a dime. In the spring the door at the top of the stairs stopped latching, and she got used to the sound it makes instead.
The crew came on a Tuesday and started drilling for piers along the front of the house. There’s a line on the log sheet for every two feet. Fill, clay, clay, wet clay. At twenty-two feet the rod quit going down, and the man running it wrote refusal and the depth beside it and had her initial the sheet.
You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you. Isaiah gives that as a song for the land of Judah, one that will be sung in that day, about a strong city with salvation for its walls and ramparts and gates opened for a nation that keeps faith.
In the same song God humbles those who dwell on high. He lays the lofty city low, levels it to the ground, casts it down to the dust. The people singing about a mind at peace are people who have watched a city come down. Nothing in the song claims their own walls never moved.
Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord, the Lord himself, is the Rock eternal. They say the name twice over. The rock was under that ground before anybody quarried a stone out of it or laid a foundation on it.
I sleep better on a number than on a promise, and I know which of the two is worth more.
The crack is still there. The crew comes back in the spring to point it, and she has stopped getting up in the night to look at it. What changed is twenty-two feet down, and she has never seen it.
A Prayer to Remember
The thing that’s wrong is still wrong this morning, God, and I’ve been up checking. I’d like my steadiness to come from further down than how the week is going. You were under all of this before anybody built on it. Hold me there today. Give me one thing to do this morning that I’d only do if that were true.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
