The Last One to Sit Down

She is the last one to sit down. She is also the first one to get up.

It is not a rule. Nobody made it. It is simply what happens: the plates go out, and somebody wants the other sort of sauce, and the little one has too much on his and needs half of it taking away, and by the time she is actually in her chair there are two people at that table who have finished.

She is very good at this. That is the part nobody thinks about. Running a household's happiness is a real skill and she has it. She knows on a Wednesday that Thursday is going to be difficult, and she moves three things so that it is not. She knows which one of them has to be asked about school in the car and never at the table. She knows the exact half hour when her father can be rung.

Everyone in her life is, broadly speaking, all right, and a great deal of that is her, and nobody knows it, including her.

Then somebody says, so how are you.

And she gives them the news. Ben has settled at the new place, actually, which is a relief. Dad has been better since they changed his tablets. Her sister has finally had the conversation about the house. She delivers it well, and there is real gladness in her voice, because all of that is genuinely good and she is genuinely glad about it.

She has not answered the question.

She has not noticed that she has not answered the question. If you stopped her and asked again, slowly, there would be a pause, and in that pause she would go looking for the file and find there is not one.

Not because she is sad. That is the thing people get wrong about this. She is not sad. She is unallocated.

Somewhere in the last four or five years the entry system changed. Every good thing that came into the house got written down under somebody else's name, and she became the one who reads out the news rather than one of the people the news is about, and she does not remember agreeing to that.

And you are the one reading out the news.

You could tell anybody in your life exactly what would make them happy this week. Ask what would make you happy and something goes very quiet, and then, because it is you, you make a joke and pass it on to the next person.

Who is doing the rejoicing

There is a verse people quote at tired women, and it is almost always quoted the wrong way round.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Read the verbs and notice who is doing them. He rejoices. He rests. He sings. Not one of those is an instruction, and there is nothing anywhere in that sentence that a tired person has to organize, cater or remember the candles for.

You are the one being sung over, and not the one running the room. Zephaniah 3:17 says He will joy over thee with singing, and the singing in that verse is entirely His while the being sung over is entirely yours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a woman who has not been asked a real question in four years.

That reversal matters more than it sounds, because the whole ache in this is an accounting ache. The good has been arriving for years and getting filed elsewhere. Here is a good thing arriving with only one possible name on it, and the name is not Ben's and it is not your father's.

Joy is not another item on the list

Now a guard, and it is the most important paragraph here.

Nobody is about to tell you to cheer up. If joy became the newest thing you were responsible for producing on schedule, this message would have made your life measurably worse, and a great many well-meaning ones do exactly that.

You have not been handed joy as an assignment. Galatians 5:22 calls joy fruit of the Spirit rather than a work of the person, and fruit is what grows on a branch that stays attached rather than what a branch manufactures by trying harder, and the growing is the Spirit's own work.

And if what is underneath this is heavier than depletion, that has to be said plainly too. Some people reading this are not merely stretched. Some are grieving, and some are carrying something that has a proper name and needs proper care. That is not a failure of gladness and it is not what this message is arguing with. If somebody is caring for you, stay with them and keep every appointment, because God has never once been in competition with the people He has put in the room, and nothing here is a reason to do less of the ordinary sensible things.

Joy is offered. It is never demanded, and it is never a test you can be behind on.

The question nobody has answered

There is a road in Mark where a blind man is shouting, and the crowd is managing him, and Jesus stops the whole thing and asks him one question.

What wilt thou that I should do unto thee.

He does not accept an answer from the crowd. The crowd has plenty of opinions about what the man needs and He does not take a single one of them. He asks the man, and He waits, and the man has to say the thing himself, out loud, in his own voice.

You are being asked directly, and it is not a rhetorical question. Mark 10:51 has Jesus halt a whole road to ask a man what he wants done for him, and He takes the answer from nobody else in the road, and the Spirit is the one putting that same question to a woman four years into holding everybody else's news.

That pause you fall into when somebody asks how you are is not emptiness. It is a filing system with nothing under your name, and a filing system can be changed.

Very small is allowed

The temptation now is to go looking for something big enough to be worth saying, and that instinct is exactly what has kept the file empty. Big things are rare. That is what makes them big.

You have permission for it to be tiny, and tiny is not a lesser answer. Zechariah 4:10 asks who hath despised the day of small things, and the question is written as a rebuke rather than as an encouragement, and the Spirit does not weigh a gladness before He receives it.

The right coffee. The smell when the washing comes off the line. A song you actually like coming on in the car when you are alone. The particular joke your daughter has started making. A hot bath and nobody knocking. These are not consolation prizes for people whose lives are too small for real joy. They are what joy is mostly made of, in every life, for everyone, and the only reason yours has gone unlisted is that nobody was writing anything down under your name.