A Refuge I Have Never Been To

She believes it entirely and she has never once used it.

If you asked her whether God is a refuge she would say yes without a pause, and she would mean it, and she could tell you why. She is not vague and she is not pretending. It is a settled thing in her.

But go back through the last three difficult years with me, and count the times she actually went there.

The night the results came. She sat up until four and read.

The week her brother stopped speaking to her. She reorganized a kitchen.

The Thursday it all came at once. She drove.

She read, she cleaned, she drove, she worked, she watched things she did not enjoy, she stayed up. She did not once, on any of those nights, do the thing she believes is true.

And she would not describe this as unbelief, and she would be right, because it is not.

It is that the refuge lives in her as a fact about the world rather than as a place with a way in. She knows the shelter is there the way you know a mountain is there. She has simply never walked up it.

Three years. Every one of those nights spent somewhere else.

So let me ask you.

When did you last actually go to the place you say you have?

Ever-present is a fact about Him

The psalm opens with a line so familiar it slides straight past, so we are going to slow it down to its three parts.

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.Psalm 46:1

Refuge. Strength. Ever-present help in trouble.

That middle phrase is the one I want. Ever-present. In the Hebrew it carries the sense of being found, of being readily met, and it is not a statement about your access arrangements. It is a statement about where He is.

Psalm 46 puts the availability on God rather than on the traveler's route, and the Spirit who gave that psalm was describing a property of His nearness and not a skill you have to acquire, so the shelter you believe in has never once been further off than the night you needed it.

Now, honestly, and quietly, because you are not somebody who needs to be shouted at.

You are not a hypocrite. I want that said plainly, because the accusation is already forming in you and it is the wrong one.

What has happened is much more ordinary than hypocrisy. The refuge became information. It sits with all the other true things you know, and true things you know do not require you to go anywhere, and so on the bad nights your hands reached for the kitchen and your keys, because those are places, and the mountain was a fact.

Psalm 46 says in trouble, which names the hour rather than a general condition, and the Spirit put the word trouble in the sentence deliberately, which means four in the morning was exactly the address on that verse and you have spent three years reading it in daylight.

And look at what the psalm does next, because it does not stay abstract for a single line.

Though the earth give way. Though the mountains fall into the heart of the sea. Though the waters roar and foam.

It is a psalm written for the loudest possible night, not for a quiet study.

Psalm 46 pictures the earth giving way in the verses right after that opening, and the Spirit was in that placement rather than in any calm, so a refuge you only ever visit in theory has never been the one that psalm is describing.