Hazards On And The Phone At Four Percent

Latoya remembers the number on the battery and almost nothing else.

Four percent. She remembers looking at it and doing the arithmetic about how long that gives a person, and getting it wrong, and doing it again.

She remembers the hazards clicking. She remembers the specific noise a truck makes going past when you are stopped and it is not, which is a noise she had never noticed before in her life and now notices every time.

And she remembers thinking, quite clearly, nobody knows where I am.

That was in June. Three months ago.

And what she has carried since is not a memory of a day. It is a memory of a feeling, and the feeling has a shape, and the shape is: I was helpless out there.

Now here is what she does not remember, and it is the reason this is worth writing about.

She put the hazards on before she was fully stopped. That is a thing she did, quickly, correctly, without being told.

She got over onto the shoulder as far as she could and turned the wheels away from the road.

She rang the roadside people first, before anybody else, because the phone was dying and that was the call that mattered, and she made that judgment in about four seconds.

She stayed in the car with the doors locked rather than standing out on the grass, which is what somebody who knew what they were doing would have told her to do.

And she texted her sister the road number and the direction of travel, in six words, to save the battery.

Five correct decisions in about ninety seconds by a woman with four percent and no plan.

She could not tell you any of that. If you asked her about June she would say: I broke down and it was horrible.

Her sister said in July, "You were so calm on that text."

And Latoya said, "I really wasn't."

The feeling got recorded and the actions did not

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to tell you it was not frightening. It was. A woman stopped on a shoulder with a dying phone is in a genuinely bad position and nobody should minimize that.

And I am not going to guess at what went wrong with the car. That belongs to somebody qualified with it in front of them.

One plain thing first, because a day like that can leave more behind than a bad memory. If any of what happened in June has taken you somewhere darker, if there are thoughts in it about not being here, tell a person today: a sister, a friend, a doctor, or the 988 crisis line for anyone in the United States. That is not a detour from this message. It is the most important line in it.

What I want to look at is what got written down in her and what did not.

Because a body under threat records the threat. That is its job. It stores the danger in high resolution, so that next time it can be recognized faster, and that is a good system and it has kept people alive for a very long time.

What it does not store, or stores badly, is competence.

The five decisions Latoya made in ninety seconds were made by the part of her that gets things done, and that part does not narrate. It does not write anything into the record. So the record of June contains a truck noise and a battery percentage and a sentence about nobody knowing where she was, and it contains almost nothing about a woman doing five correct things in a row.

You are not somebody who fell apart on that road, and Scripture puts God's help inside the trouble rather than after it. It is written that God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble, which locates the help in the middle rather than at the end, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about ninety seconds on a shoulder in June.

Look at the verse itself, because the middle word is the one doing the work.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.Psalm 46:1

A very present help in trouble.

Not: a help after trouble. Not: a help that arrives once somebody has held on long enough. Present, in it, at the time.

And the older sense of that phrase carries the idea of being found, of being readily available, of somebody who is right there when you turn round.

Which means the help was not somewhere else during those ninety seconds. It was in the car.

You were being helped in the middle of it, and the passage puts the presence in the trouble rather than on the far side of it. Psalm 46 says a very present help in trouble, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that a claim about the minutes themselves rather than about the recovery afterward.

Write down what you actually did

Here is the practical thing, and it is a list.

Write down every single thing you did that day. In order. From the first noise to walking through your own door.

Not how it felt. What you did.

Turned the hazards on. Got to the shoulder. Turned the wheels. Called roadside first. Stayed in the car. Locked the doors. Texted six words. Waited. Answered the driver's questions. Got home.

Ten lines, maybe twelve.

And then read it back.

Because what will be sitting on that page is a woman handling an emergency correctly and alone with a dying phone, and that woman has never once been introduced to the woman who has been carrying June around.

They are the same person and only one of them made it into the story.

You have a record that has never been written down, and no verse anywhere asks a person to be defined by the part of an event that frightened them. Psalm 46 goes on to say that God is in the midst of her and she shall not be moved, which puts the steadiness inside the place rather than after the danger, and the Spirit of God is what makes an honest list an act of agreement with that.

And I want to say the thing about your sister, because it is the most useful sentence anybody has said about this.

She said the text was calm. And the answer that came back was, I really was not.

Both of those are true and that is the whole point. You did not feel calm. And the text was calm, because the part of you that writes six useful words under pressure did its job perfectly while the rest of you was frightened.

Being frightened and being capable are not on opposite ends of anything. They happened in the same ninety seconds, in the same woman, and only one of them got remembered.

You were capable and frightened at the same time, and Scripture never once treats fear as evidence about what a person can do. It is written that God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved, which is Psalm 46 putting the not-moving on His presence rather than on anybody's composure, and His Spirit is what makes that available to a woman who did not feel steady for one second.