Chapter 501: Departure
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Psalm 27:1 — “The LORD is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear?”
She woke before her alarm, which was normal now, because she had learned that the Holy Spirit did not keep office hours and sometimes had things to say at 4:47 in the morning.
Fear and faith could coexist. She had proved this empirically, in real time, in situations with no safety net, and she thought someone should put it in the church bulletin: ‘You will be terrified and you will do it anyway and that is what courage looks like from the inside.’ She breathed. She prayed. She moved. She kept moving. This was the whole of it, repeated until the chapter was finished.
Post-Rapture Nashville was unrecognizable. A third of the population had vanished. The infrastructure held, barely, and then the new government began tightening, and the city began to look exactly like Revelation chapter thirteen had always said it would.
The roadblock was new — just set up, uniforms and everything — and they had three Bibles under the seat and a van full of Revelation chapters and two minutes to decide what to do.
She was not fighting for victory. She was fighting from victory. Jesus had already won. Her job was to stand in that won ground and not give it back.
She shared her earphone with him on the long drive because his phone was dead. The playlist was one she’d never shown anyone. He listened to the whole thing and at the end said: ‘Again?’ She hit play.
She put on worship music and prayed until the darkness in the room changed, which sounds strange until you’ve experienced it, and then it sounds exactly accurate. She had been in the hands of God all day. She was in the hands of God now. She would be in the hands of God tomorrow. This was not a feeling. It was a fact she had learned to build on.
She noted the date in her journal without a label. She knew she would understand why she’d remembered it.
She was afraid. She was also held. She was also going. That combination, she had come to understand, was the entire definition of faith.
