The Bread Was Still Warm

By ten past eight she had done eleven things and every one of them properly.

Two lots of washing on and one out. The tablets counted into the box with the days on it, and the repeat ordered, and the pharmacy rung because they had done it wrong again last time. A note for the school about the trip. Her mother's carer swapped from Wednesday to Thursday, which took three calls. The dog. The bin, which is Thursday, and nobody else in that house has ever once known which bin.

At the gate the neighbor said what the neighbor always says, which is that she does not know how she does it, and that she is amazing, honestly.

She said, oh you know. And she smiled, and she meant the smile, in the sense that her face did it correctly.

On the way back she stopped at the baker's on the corner because they had a loaf out and there was no queue. Warm through the paper bag, warm enough to feel through her coat sleeve. She put it on the passenger seat and drove home and sat at the lights on the hill with her hands at ten to two.

And at the lights she tried to remember the last time something had been simply nice.

Not significant. Not an achievement, not a relief, not a thing crossed off. Nice. The last time something had come to her without a job attached to it and she had felt it arrive.

She could not find one. She went back over the summer, the holiday, her birthday, the meal out that everybody said was lovely. She could remember all of it accurately, the way you remember a report you wrote. She could not find the feeling anywhere in it, and by the time the lights changed she had stopped looking.

The loaf was still warm when she carried it in. She put it in the bread bin, and hung up her coat, and started the next thing.

And you would not call yourself unhappy. That is the part nobody understands, and it is why you have never mentioned this to a living soul. Unhappy would be simpler and it would at least be a weather. You would call yourself fine. You are competent, you are steady, everything gets done, and the whole apparatus is running beautifully with nobody at the controls, and somewhere in the last two or three years the sound went off.

Numbness is not ingratitude

Let me take the worst thing off the table first, because it has been sitting there a long while.

This is not ingratitude. Whatever else is going on in you, it is not that. Ingratitude has an opinion. Ingratitude looks at a good thing and thinks not enough, and it argues, and there is heat in it. What is happening here is the opposite: a good thing arrives, and it is registered, filed, appreciated in the correct words, and nothing happens in the chest.

It is not sin and it is not backsliding and it is not a sign that something has gone wrong between you and God. It is what a person is like after a long stretch of holding a lot of things up.

Because here is the plain mechanical fact of it, and nobody explains this to women who cope. Whatever it is in a person that turns the volume down on the hard things turns it down on everything. You cannot get one without the other. The dial does not have a setting for feel less of the hospital letters and the same amount of the warm loaf. So you dialled it down in order to keep functioning, which was sensible and which worked, and the loaf went quiet along with everything else, and nobody warned you that was the arrangement.

You are not ungrateful, and the flatness is not a verdict on you. Scripture is not shy about people who kept going with nothing left in the tank: it is written of Elijah under the tree that he lay down and slept and was fed before God said one word to him about anything, and the Holy Spirit who tended a prophet like that is not standing over a tired woman requiring a performance of gladness.

Now look at how joy actually comes back, in a psalm written by people who had been carrying for a very long time.

Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The LORD hath done great things for them.Psalm 126:2

Read the tense and the direction. Their mouth was filled. It happened to them. Nobody in that psalm gets an instruction to lift their spirits, and nobody in it manufactures a thing. The verse before says they were like them that dream, which is exactly what it feels like when something you had written off comes back: it does not feel earned, it feels unreal.

You were never asked to produce this yourself. The written word calls joy a fruit of the Spirit, and fruit is grown rather than made, and the Holy Spirit is named as the one who does the growing, which takes the whole business off your list and puts it on His.

Joy is fruit, and fruit is not output

Everything else in your life is output. That is the trouble.

Producing outcomes is the one skill this life has trained to a fine point, and joy is the single thing in the house that cannot be produced that way. Push on it and it goes further off. Set it as a target for the week and it becomes another item on the fridge door, which is the exact thing that flattened it in the first place.

So we will not be doing that here. Nobody in this message is going to tell you to be joyful. That instruction has done a great deal of damage to good people, and it is not in the psalm, and it is not what the Spirit does.

The verdict that you have gone cold has no right to stay in this house. Scripture says He knoweth our frame and remembereth that we are dust, and that is written as tenderness rather than as a complaint, and it is the Holy Spirit who presses that on a woman who suspects she has become a machine.

And if what you are carrying is heavier than tiredness, and has been for a long time, that is worth saying out loud to somebody whose job it is to help, your own doctor included. Getting help for a low that will not lift is not a failure of faith and never was. God is not in competition with the people He put in the world to look after us.

You have not lost the capacity for it, and it did not leave the building. Psalm 126 is the story of a return, and a return is only possible for something that still exists somewhere, and the Spirit who filled those mouths with laughter has been with you through every single one of the eleven things you did before ten past eight.

Here is what I actually want to put in your hands, and it is deliberately small.

You are allowed a joy the size of a warm loaf. Scripture says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, and He does not attach a size limit to every, so the warmth through a paper bag counts, and the Holy Spirit is entirely willing to meet a person there rather than at some larger moment they are supposed to work up to.

That is not a technique for getting the big feeling back. It is not a first step in a program. It is the actual size that joy comes in most days for most people, and the reason you cannot remember one is not that none arrived. It is that nobody was at the controls when they did.