When The Room Gets Loud

She got as far as the corridor before she realized she had stood up.

That is not an exaggeration. There was a moment where two people were talking over each other, one of them not even angrily, and then there was a moment where she was in a corridor with her coat over her arm, and the bit in between is not available to her.

It has happened in four rooms in three years.

A church meeting. A team thing at work that turned. Her sister's kitchen at Christmas, which was the worst one. And a residents' association evening in a hall about a car park, which was so trivial that it has become slightly funny, and is the one she thinks about most, because a car park.

She knows exactly what happens now, physically, because she has paid attention.

There is a warmth up the back of the neck. Then the sound goes strange, as though the room has been mixed badly and every voice is at the same volume. Then her hearing narrows and there is a high thin ringing behind everything, and about four seconds after that she is standing.

She has never once decided to leave. She has always arrived at the leaving already in progress.

What she has decided, over three years, and never said out loud, is that she is not equipped for rooms with edges in them. That she is going to have to build a life out of the smooth parts. That whatever it is other people have that lets them sit through an argument and then have a cup of tea, she was not given.

She sent an apology after the sister's kitchen. It said she had a headache. Everybody accepted it, warmly, and nobody has ever asked.

Be still. It is an instruction, and it is given inside the trouble.

Sit down here where it is quiet, because there is a line in a psalm that is doing exactly what your body needs and it is not the line people think it is.

Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.Psalm 4:4

Commune with your own heart. And be still.

Now notice where the psalm is. It is not a calm psalm. It is written by a man surrounded by people saying things about him, and he is not being told to leave, and he is not being told to answer either.

He is being told to be still, on purpose, as an action, in the middle of the trouble.

Hear this in your own corridor. You are not unequipped for rooms, and the written word is what settles it, not comfort. Scripture hands stillness to a man who is being talked about, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it possible, and He does not issue an instruction to somebody He has not made able to obey it.

Now let me name what happens in those four seconds, because you have described it precisely and nobody has ever told you what it is.

That is not fear and it is not weakness. That is a body doing an emergency procedure it learned somewhere, correctly, at speed, without consulting you. The warmth, the flat sound, the ringing: that is a system that has decided the room is dangerous and is getting you out.

It is not a character trait. It is a reflex, and reflexes are trained, and yours has been trained by something, and the fact that it now fires in a hall about a car park tells you it is over calibrated rather than that you are broken.

Hear this too, and let it stop three years of a verdict. You are not disqualified from anything, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts stillness in the hands of somebody in the middle of conflict, and the Spirit of God has been with you in all four of those rooms including the corridor, and He was not disappointed on any of the four occasions.

And now the change, and it is deliberately tiny, because a reflex is not argued with, it is out sat.

Two minutes. That is all.

When the warmth comes up the back of your neck, you put both feet flat on the floor and you stay for two more minutes. You do not have to speak. You do not have to look at anybody. You do not have to be all right.

Two minutes, with your feet on the floor, and then you may leave and nobody will think anything of it, because people leave rooms.

What that does, over about six weeks, is teach a very fast system that this room was not in fact a fire. That is the whole mechanism, and it works on the same principle as everything else the body learns, which is repetition rather than resolve.