Deep calls to deep

After the break comes a stretch no one warns you about — not the old life, not the new, but a strange suspended in-between. One writer on transitions, William Bridges, called this the neutral zone: the disorienting middle where you have let go of the old and not yet laid hold of the new, hanging in the air like a trapeze artist who has released one bar and not yet caught the next, holding nothing at all. The sons of Korah knew the feeling from the inside long before anyone gave it a name. Deep calls to deep at the noise of your waterfalls, they sing; all your waves and your billows have swept over me. It is the language of someone in over his head, one breaker arriving before the last has passed, the floor of the sea calling up to the floor of the sky. This is the very threshold of the wilderness, where Disconnect tips over into the long disorientation ahead. And in that overwhelmed, holding-nothing place the psalmist does the single thing that holds: he turns and speaks to his own sinking soul. Why are you in despair, my soul? Hope in God; for I shall yet praise Him.

The break has let you go, and the new thing is not yet in your hands. This is the hardest part to sit in, because there is nothing to grip — no old certainty, no new arrangement, only the mid-air and the waves coming over. The temptation is to grab anything, to bolt backward to what was or to lunge forward and fabricate a false certainty just to have something solid to hold. Resist both. The honest work of the in-between is the psalmist's work: to talk to yourself instead of only listening to yourself. The sinking soul keeps reporting that all is lost; you do not have to believe the report. Why are you downcast? Hope in God. Notice he does not say he feels hope. He commands it, sets it deliberately before his own heart as a fact truer than the waves. You will not always feel the far shore coming. You can still preach it to your soul while you wait, in the dark, holding nothing but the promise.