A Dread With Nothing in It

It came on Wednesday at about ten past three and you were putting something in a cupboard.

Nothing had happened. Nobody had rung. You had had a perfectly ordinary morning and there was nothing in the afternoon to be dreading, and you were holding a tin.

And it arrived, the way it does, from underneath rather than in front, and for about forty minutes everything had a weight on it.

Then it went, and you got on with the evening, and by eight o'clock you would have found it hard to describe.

That is the third time this month.

You have tried to look it up and you cannot, because a search needs a subject and there is not one. Everything you find assumes a worry: about health, about money, about somebody. You put those in and the results are all about people who are afraid of a thing.

You are not afraid of a thing. That is the entire strangeness of it.

You have not told anybody, because the first question anybody would ask is what it is about, and you would say nothing, and they would think you were protecting them, and then you would have to explain that you genuinely mean nothing.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you what it is about. It is not about anything, you have said so carefully, and a stranger who supplies a cause is inventing one so that the page has somewhere to go. Scripture already said it in Psalm 77:2-3, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

I am not going to give you a breathing technique. There are good ones and you may already know them, and offering one here would be the same move as supplying a cause: filling a silence because silence is uncomfortable to write.

I am not going to tell you it is spiritual attack, and I am not going to tell you it is not. I do not know and neither does anybody writing at this distance, and confident claims in either direction are the reason a great many people stop telling anybody anything.

What I will say plainly is the practical part. Three times in a month is worth mentioning to a doctor. Not because it is necessarily anything, but because that is a thing they hear often, they will not think it strange, and there are causes for episodes like this that are worth ruling out and are entirely ordinary to check.

And if it gets longer, or it stops going away, or anything about it frightens you, go sooner.

You are not making a fuss by mentioning it. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not conditional on the heart being able to name what is happening, and the Holy Spirit is in that kitchen at ten past three with a woman holding a tin.

The verse describes it without solving it

There is a passage in Psalm 77 that is unusual in the Psalms because of what it does not do.

In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord: my sore ran in the night, and ceased not: my soul refused to be comforted. I remembered God, and was troubled: I complained, and my spirit was overwhelmed.Psalm 77:2-3

Read what he actually reports.

My soul refused to be comforted. Not could not be. Refused, which is a strange and honest thing to record about yourself.

And then the line that will do the most for you: I remembered God, and was troubled.

That is the opposite of what everybody expects. He does the correct thing, the thing anybody would advise, and it makes it worse, and he writes that down and it stays in the book.

There is no cause named anywhere in that passage. He does not say what the trouble was. He describes a state, at night, that did not respond to the ordinary remedies, and the psalm does not resolve it for another eight verses and never explains it at all.

You are not doing it wrong when the remedies do not work. Scripture says I remembered God, and was troubled: I complained, and my spirit was overwhelmed, Psalm 77:3, and it was preserved without correction rather than fixed, and the Holy Spirit is not requiring an episode to respond to technique before He is present in it.

Why there is nothing to look up

The vocabulary for fear is built around objects. You are afraid of something; that is how the word works, and every article, every questionnaire, every conversation assumes the preposition. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 77:2-3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

Yours has no object, so there is no phrase, and without a phrase there is nothing to type.

And there is a second difficulty. Because it goes, and because by eight o'clock it is hard to describe, you have nothing to bring to anybody even if you wanted to. It does not persist long enough to be examined. It is like trying to show somebody a noise the car only makes on hills. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 77:2-3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

That is not evidence that it is imaginary. Three times in a month is a pattern, and you noticed it, and noticing is what a careful person does.

You are not inventing something because it has no object. Scripture says thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book, Psalm 56:8, and the keeping is of the experience itself rather than of an account with a cause attached, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a reason before He takes it seriously.

What is available while it is happening

Not a technique to end it. Four words, said out loud, while it is going on.

God, it is here.

That is the whole thing. No explanation, because there is not one, and no request, because you do not know what to ask for.

Say it at ten past three, with the tin still in your hand, out loud if the house is empty.

It will not stop it. I am not going to tell you it will, and if I did you would try it once and find that it did not and stop reading this site.

What it does is different. For the forty minutes it lasts, you will not be alone with it, and being alone with a thing that has no name is most of what makes it unbearable.

You are not required to explain it before you speak. Scripture says the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, Romans 8:26, and the unutterable is a named and honored category rather than a failure to communicate, and the Holy Spirit is the one already carrying what has no words in it.