Falling and Falling Out

Everybody around here knows the difference between the two on a hillside and nobody has ever explained it to her about anything else.

On this path, after rain, you go down. Not sometimes. You go down, on the flat stone where the water crosses, and you have been going down there since you were six, and so has everyone else in the valley, and there is no shame attached to it whatsoever. You get up, you rub your hip, you say something unrepeatable about that stone, and you keep climbing.

Falling off the path is a different thing entirely, and it happens too, and it is serious, and there is one place near the top where it would be very serious indeed.

Nobody in this valley confuses the two. A person who has gone down is still on the path and still going up. A person who has gone off is somewhere else.

Ruby is fifty-four and she fell in the fourth year, and nobody has ever, in thirty years, explained to her which one she did.

It was a bad fall, and she is not going to pretend otherwise, and she would be irritated with anybody who tried to. There were consequences and some of them are still walking around. She has never told the whole thing to anyone in one sitting; her sister has one part of it and a woman she used to work with has another and God has all of it.

What she has never had is the word. She has had thirty years of not knowing whether what happened to her in the fourth year was a fall or a departure. And a woman who does not know that will do exactly what Ruby has done, which is to go on climbing while privately assuming she is on the wrong hillside.

You may not have a valley and a wet stone. But you went down, once, hard, and nobody ever handed you the word for it, and you have been carrying on without one.

There is a verse that grants the fall outright and then tells you what is under you.

The psalm does not pretend you did not fall

Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand.Psalm 37:24

Take the first three words on their own, because they are the reason this verse can be trusted.

Though he fall. The psalm does not begin by saying that the person who belongs to God will not fall. It grants it. It says though, which is the word you use for a thing you are expecting to happen and are not going to argue about.

That matters more than the comfort does. A verse that promised Ruby she would never have gone down in the fourth year would be a verse she could not use, because she did. This one starts where she is.

He shall not be utterly cast down. There is the distinction, in one word: utterly. Down, yes. Utterly down, cast off, finished, no. The verse is doing exactly what the valley does with that stone.

For the LORD upholdeth him with his hand. And there is the reason, and the reason is not the quality of the person's footing.

You are down and not cast off, and it is already the Lord's hand under you, and the psalm granted the fall before it said a word of comfort. I am not making light of the fourth year. It is written in Psalm 37:24, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a psalm that expects a fall and lays it under a woman on a wet hillside thirty years later.

Upheld does not mean unhurt

Now I want to be plain about something, because a woman like Ruby will smell a soft version coming from a hundred yards off.

Upheld does not mean she did not hit the ground. It does not mean the consequences were not real, and it does not mean the people who were hurt were not hurt. That is what happens when you go down on stone: it costs, and the cost is not canceled by the fact that you are still on the path.

The verse is not about the pain. It is about the position.

And that is exactly the distinction nobody made for her, so she assumed that the size of the cost was information about the position. It was not. The cost tells you how hard the fall was. Only the hand tells you where you are.

You are still on the path, and it is already His hand that keeps you there, and the size of what it cost was never the measure of where you stand. Scripture says the Lord upholds him with His hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates the pain of a fall from the question of a departure in a woman who has had them tangled for thirty years.

Nothing here says the stone does not matter

And let me say the other side, because Ruby would not trust a message that skipped it, and she would be right not to.

Being upheld is not permission to go and stand on the wet stone deliberately. Nobody in this valley does that. Knowing you will be caught is not a reason to jump, and the psalm is not written to somebody planning a fall; it is written to somebody who has had one.

A person who takes assurance and uses it to be careless has not understood assurance. They have understood a loophole, and there is no loophole here.

You are held, and you are also still walking, and both of those are already true at once. It is written that though he fall he shall not be utterly cast down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person both their footing and their standing without ever trading one for the other.