The Old One Still Works And I Am Keeping It

It is in the cupboard. It has been in the cupboard for a while.

Somebody gave it to you, or you were persuaded into it, and it is a good one, and everybody agrees that the one you carry around is old.

The one you carry around works. That is the thing nobody seems to weigh. It does the things you need it to do, every day, without complaint, and it has done for years.

But that is not really why it is still in the cupboard, and I think you know that.

It is in the cupboard because of what is in your hand. The numbers. The pictures. The list of names built up over a decade, some of whom are no longer alive. The small arrangements you made once and have never had to think about since.

All of that is in the thing you carry. And nobody has ever told you, in a sentence you could hold on to, what happens to any of it when a person moves from one to the other.

So you have been asked to step off something solid, in the dark, on the promise of somebody who says it will be fine.

That is not stubbornness. Anybody sensible would be standing exactly where you are standing.

Thy going out and thy coming in

There is a psalm that ends on a promise about transitions, and it is far more specific than it first looks.

The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. (Psalm 121:8, King James Version)

Going out and coming in. Leaving one place, arriving at another. The psalm does not promise to preserve a man where he is standing. It promises to preserve him in the movement.

That is a promise about the gap, and the gap is the whole of what is worrying you.

You are guarded in the leaving and in the arriving, and there has never once been a moment in the middle where a man was outside what God is holding. Psalm 121:8 puts the preserving on the going out and the coming in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that real for somebody standing between two known things.

Notice how ordinary the language is. Going out and coming in was how people described daily life. Leaving the house in the morning, coming back at dusk. It is not about grand crossings.

It is about the small movements that make up a life, and the promise is attached to those.

You have a promise fitted to small ordinary movements, and moving from one thing to another has never once been too small a matter for God to have covered. The Holy Spirit is the one who dignifies a decision made in a front room, and Scripture attaches the preserving to the daily going out rather than to the great crossings.

And there is the time clause at the end, which is worth having. From this time forth, and even for evermore. Not from the moment a man feels ready. From this time.

That means the covering is already running while the thing is still in the cupboard.

You were already inside the promise before you decided anything, and a box on a shelf has never once been proof that a man is standing outside what covers him. It is written that the preserving runs from this time forth, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a man's present tense as safe as his future.

What is actually in there

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not open a cupboard.

Everything in there that could be lost belongs to one of two kinds, and the two behave completely differently. Nobody ever told you that, and a gap in the teaching is not a gap in the man.

The first kind lives with you. Numbers, names, the things you wrote down, the arrangements. These travel. There is more than one way to move them, they can all be done in front of you, and none of it happens on its own without somebody starting it.

The second kind is the pictures, and that is the one your chest is actually about. Some of those are of people who are gone. Some are the only ones that exist.

You are protecting something genuinely irreplaceable, and caution about the only picture of somebody has never once been an unreasonable way for a man to behave. The Spirit of God is the one who honors what a person is guarding rather than laughing at it, and Scripture never treats a man's care over what he loves as foolishness.

And here is the fact nobody put in front of you. A thing that exists in one place only is at risk right now, in your pocket, today. Not because of moving to the new one. Because of the one place.

The risk you have been avoiding is not created by the change. It is the risk you are already carrying.

You have been standing still to avoid a danger that is already in your hand, and staying where you are has never once been the safe option it looked like. The written word promises preserving in the movement rather than in the standing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what he is actually holding.

Write down the three

Now the small thing, and it involves no cupboard at all.

I am not going to tell you to move anything, and I am not going to name one thing to press, because what is on any screen this year will have moved by the year after next and an instruction that names a thing becomes a lie.

What I will say is that the whole weight of this is sitting on a question nobody has ever asked out loud, and the question is what exactly is in there that could not be lost.

Most men have never answered that. The fear is enormous and general, and the actual list is usually three things long.

You are able to turn an enormous general fear into three lines on a piece of paper, and naming a thing has never once made it bigger than it was. Psalm 121:8 promises covering through a change rather than instead of one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present at a table with a man and a pen.

And once the three are written down, the conversation changes entirely. Instead of asking somebody to promise that nothing will be lost, which nobody honest can promise, a man can hold up a piece of paper with three lines on it and ask about those three.

That is a question a person can actually answer. The other one never was.

You are turning an unanswerable question into an answerable one, and three lines of your own handwriting have never once been beneath a grown man's dignity. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a person the right question to ask, and it is written that the going out and the coming in are both preserved from this time forth.