The Tree You Never Mentioned

There is a tree on the corner where she turns left, and in the third week of March it opens.

She has walked past it every working morning for six years and she has never once been ready for it. It goes from bare to that, in about two days, great pale cups of it all the way up, and the light comes through them so they look lit from the inside rather than the outside. On the Monday it stops her. She actually stops walking, on a pavement, with her bag on her shoulder, like somebody who has forgotten where she is going.

And she does not say it to anybody.

Not on the Monday. On the Monday there is her sister's news, three weeks old and still sitting in the middle of the family like furniture nobody can move, and you do not walk into a room where that is and start on about a tree.

Not on the Tuesday either, because the radio is on in the kitchen at six and she stands there with the kettle going and listens to the first four minutes, and afterwards a sentence about blossom would be obscene.

On the Wednesday she gets as far as opening her mouth. A colleague is by the window with a mug and the light is doing something remarkable in the car park, and she has the whole sentence ready, and then she remembers about his father, and she asks him how the weekend was instead.

By Thursday it has stopped being a decision. It has become the way she is.

Then it rains on Thursday night. Properly, the kind that goes on for hours, and when she comes round the corner on Friday morning half of it is down. The pavement is covered in them, brown at the edges already, going to mush under people's shoes, and there are gaps in the tree where the light comes straight through.

She stands there far longer than a person should stand on a pavement at ten past eight.

And what she feels is entirely out of proportion, and she knows it, and that makes it worse. Grief. Actual grief, for a tree, on a Friday, while there are things in the world that deserve the word and a sister who deserves it more.

So she does not say that either. Obviously. She could not begin to explain it and she is not going to try.

And you have been doing this for years.

You have been carrying gladness the way people carry contraband, close to the body, not declared at any point, because you worked out somewhere along the way that to say a good thing out loud is to make a claim about the state of the world, and you know exactly what the state of the world is. So the small true things get swallowed. The tree, the way the bread came out, the fact that your youngest sang the whole way home. All of it received in private and none of it spoken, and by now there is quite a lot of it in there.

Nobody in Psalm 126 was told to cheer up

Read the psalm and notice what kind of sentence the laughter is.

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. The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad.Psalm 126:2-3

It is a report. Nobody is commanded to laugh anywhere in it. The mouth was filled, past tense, by something that happened, and the singing arrived the way weather arrives, and then the psalm does the thing everybody forgets and gets to verse five, where they that sow in tears shall reap in joy, because the same psalm that has laughter in it also has people going out weeping and carrying seed.

Both are in there. In one short psalm, unresolved, sitting side by side, with no instruction anywhere to swap one for the other.

You are not required to choose between being glad and being honest. Scripture puts laughter and tears in the same psalm without apologizing for either, and the God who inspired it has never once asked a person to counterfeit a feeling in order to be acceptable to Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who comforts rather than a person's own management of their face.

That matters here more than anywhere, so let me be plain. Nobody is going to tell you to cheer up on this page. If today is a day when nothing true is glad, then nothing true is glad, and you are not failing at anything. Joy is offered in Scripture, never demanded, and a gladness produced to order is not joy, it is performance, and there is enough of that about.

You were never given a quota of suffering to feel before a good thing became allowable. His word says that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and it puts no eligibility test underneath, and the Spirit of God is called the Comforter rather than the auditor of who has earned an easy afternoon.

Gladness is not a claim about the world

Here is the mistake, and it is a decent, kind, thoughtful mistake, which is why it has lasted so long.

A sentence about a tree has been treated, for years now, as though it were a verdict on the world.

It is not. Saying "the tree on the corner is out and it stopped me dead" makes no claim whatever about your sister, or the radio at six, or a colleague's father. It is not a statement that everything is fine. It is a statement that one thing, in one hundred square feet of pavement, on one morning, was good, and that you saw it.

The world does not become worse because a good thing in it was named. That is not how it works. And nowhere on earth is there a person whose sorrow is one gram lighter because you kept quiet about blossom.

Your gladness has never once been taken from somebody else's plate. Scripture says the Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad, and it lets the gladness be caused by Him rather than by the state of the news, and the Spirit is the one who keeps the two from being confused in a person who is genuinely paying attention.

And look at the Lord Himself for one moment, because He settles this in a way no argument does. Jesus wept at a graveside, standing among people He loved. The same Jesus, in Luke's Gospel, rejoiced in spirit and said so out loud in front of everybody. Nobody has ever accused Him of not taking the world seriously.

Two weathers at once is not confusion. It is accuracy, and it is what a whole person looks like.

You are allowed to hold two true things in one hour without either of them being a lie. Scripture has a man of sorrows who was also anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows, both said of the same Person, both written, and it is the Spirit and not your composure who holds a heart steady enough to carry the pair of them.