The Word He Used in the Room

He said it once and then carried on, and you did not stop him, because he was being kind and the appointment was running late and you did not want to be the person who slowed it down.

You wrote it down afterwards in the car park, phonetically, and you got it slightly wrong, and you have since worked out the right spelling by trying four versions.

It is half past ten and you have been at it since eight.

The first page you found was written for clinicians and you understood about a third of it. The second was written for patients and was so general it told you nothing. The third had a diagram. The fourth had a forum thread where somebody had used the same word about a different part of the body entirely, which you did not realize for twenty minutes.

You now have a rough sense of a range of things it might mean. The good end of the range is genuinely reassuring. The bad end is not, and you have spent about an hour and a half at that end.

And the thing you have not let yourself think clearly is this.

He knows what he meant. It took him one word because in his vocabulary it is a precise thing, and he could tell you in about eleven seconds, and you have been guessing at it for two and a half hours.

The search is not going to hand you the definition he had in mind. Only he can do that, and it is half past ten.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you what the word means. I have not seen the notes, I do not know the context, and a definition given at a distance is the most dangerous thing anybody could hand you tonight.

I am going to be firm about the useful part. Ring the department in the morning and ask. Say the word, say when it was used, and ask what it means in her case. That is exactly what the number is for. Nurses and secretaries field that call constantly and nobody in that building will think anything of it.

Ask for the letter, if there is one coming, and read it with somebody. Write the word on a piece of paper and take it to the next appointment and ask him to say it again more slowly.

None of that is being difficult. It is being the person in the room who understands what is happening, which is what your mother needs you to be.

You are not being a nuisance by asking. Scripture says if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, James 1:5, and the not-upbraiding is written in for people who need to ask more than once, and the Holy Spirit is with somebody at a kitchen table who does not have the vocabulary and never claimed to.

The verse is about who does not sleep

There is a passage in Psalm 121 that people read at funerals and which is a night-time psalm before it is anything else.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:3-4

Read it as somebody who is awake at half past ten because they are afraid.

He that keepeth thee will not slumber. And then, in case the point were missed, it is said again with more force: shall neither slumber nor sleep.

Twice. The repetition is doing something specific, and it is not decoration.

Somebody is being told that the keeping does not stop overnight, and the reason a person needs to hear that is that they have been keeping watch themselves and cannot see who else would.

That is you at half past ten. You are the one not sleeping, and underneath the searching is a sense that if you stop paying attention something will be missed, and the psalm is addressed precisely to that sense.

You are not the one who has to stay awake over this. Scripture says he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep, Psalm 121:4, and the sleeplessness is transferred to Him rather than shared with you, and the Holy Spirit is at work through a night whether or not anybody in the house is watching it.

What the search cannot give you

Here is why two and a half hours has produced a range rather than an answer.

A clinical word is not a definition; it is a label attached to a particular case by somebody who has seen the case. The same word means slightly different things depending on what it is applied to, what stage anything is at, and what else is true about the person it is about.

You have the word and none of the context. He has both. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 121:3-4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

So the internet can only ever give you the range. It cannot narrow it, because the narrowing is done by the information that lives in her notes and in his head, and neither of those is online.

That is not a failure of your searching. You have searched well; you found the clinician page, you worked out the spelling, you noticed the forum thread was about something else. Somebody less careful would have stopped at the third result and gone to bed frightened of the wrong thing. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 121:3-4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

The problem is not the quality of the search. It is that the answer is not in the searchable world.

You are not going to find it tonight because it is not there to be found. Scripture says the secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us, Deuteronomy 29:29, and there is a category of things not currently available, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding a definition that a better search would have produced.

The hour is doing half of this

One more thing, and it is worth saying because it will change how tomorrow goes.

You have spent an hour and a half at the bad end of the range. You did not choose to; that is what happens at that hour to everybody. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Psalm 121:3-4, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

Fear is not evenly distributed across the day. It is much cheaper at night, when the house is quiet and nobody is available and the mind has nothing else to work on. The same page read at eleven in the morning, with the kettle on and somebody in the next room, does not do what it did at half past ten.

So some part of what you are feeling tonight is not about the word at all. It is about the time. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Psalm 121:3-4, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

That is not a reason to dismiss the fear. It is a reason not to make any judgements tonight, and not to let tonight's version of the range be the one you carry into tomorrow.

You are not seeing this clearly at this hour and nobody would be. Scripture says weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning, Psalm 30:5, and it is an observation about how differently the same situation sits at two different hours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a person through the hour when everything is at its worst size.