A Garrison Around the Heart

It comes in at four. Not three, not five. Four, near enough, most nights, and it has been doing it since the autumn.

She wakes without any particular alarm. And then the film starts, and it is always the same film, and she could tell you every frame of it.

The kitchen. The phone on the counter. The way she said what she said, and the way it landed, and the door, and then the eleven months since, and the birthday card that came back, and the way her own voice sounded when she rang the third time and got nothing.

She is not tormented. She would object to that word, which is far too dramatic for a woman of her sort. She simply lies there and runs it, and about twenty minutes in she starts arguing her own case, and about forty minutes in she starts losing the argument, and by half past five she gets up and puts the kettle on because there is no sense staying in bed to be told things.

She has prayed about it. Of course she has. She has asked God for peace and she means it.

What she has never done, and this is the whole reason for this article, is set anything at the gate. Because it has never once occurred to her that there is a gate, or that anybody was supposed to be standing at it.

Peace is a posting, not a mood

And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7).

Now, that word keep is a soldier's word. It means to garrison, to post a guard, to stand watch at the gate of a city and decide what comes in.

Which means peace, in that sentence, is not a feeling that settles over a woman. It is a sentry. It is stationed. It has a job, and the job is to stand between what is outside and what is inside, and to stop things at the gate.

Most of us have prayed for peace as though we were asking for weather. Paul is describing a garrison.

You have a guard available at the gate of your own mind and you have never once called for it. The word makes peace the keeper and your heart the thing kept, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ancient military picture actual in a bedroom at four in the morning.

What is walking in unchallenged

Let me be plain about what happens at four, because I think you have never described it and it deserves describing.

Something arrives at the gate. The kitchen, the phone, the eleven months. It is not stopped, because nobody is at the gate, so it walks in and stands in the middle of your mind and unpacks.

And then it does the thing it always does: it prosecutes. It brings the words you said and it brings your voice on the third call and it lays them out, and by half past five you have been tried and convicted in your own head by a memory that has no authority to try anybody.

That is not conviction from God. Conviction moves a person toward Him and is specific and can be repented of in about a minute. This walks you in a circle for ninety minutes and leaves you at the kettle. Those are two different things and they have two different sources.

You are not on trial at four in the morning and no verdict passed there is legal. Scripture says there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Comforter and never once the prosecutor, which tells you plainly which voice has been talking.

What goes to the gate before the peace does

Now look at the verse before it, because Paul does not start with the garrison. He starts with what a person does.

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God (Philippians 4:6). And then: and the peace of God shall keep.

So the sequence is: the thing gets named to God, out loud, with thanks in it, and then the guard is posted. The naming is not a technique to earn the guard. It is simply what a person does at the gate: they say what is at it.

You have somewhere to take it at four in the morning that is not your own courtroom. The written word says make it known to God, which is an instruction addressed to a woman lying awake, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a half-said thing to God as a whole one when a person is too tired to finish a sentence.

And I will not oversell it, because you would not stand for that. Doing this does not mean the memory stops arriving. It may come at four tomorrow exactly as it did last night. What is settled is that it does not have to be let in unchallenged, and there is somebody who can be posted at the gate who is a great deal better at this than you are at half past five.