Three Years of Being the Strong One

The rota is on the fridge in his handwriting and it is the most competent thing in the house.

Columns. Initials. The Tuesday appointment in red because it moved twice. Three years of a household reorganized around somebody else's need, and he is the one who reorganized it, and he did it well, and if you took him out of that kitchen the whole arrangement would be on the floor by Thursday.

He does the phone calls that nobody wants to make. He knows which button on the machine is the one you have to press twice. He is polite to people on the end of the line who are not being polite to him, and he says thank you at the end anyway, because it is not their fault.

At his sister's in June, somebody asked him what he wanted for his birthday.

And he stood there with a plate in his hand and could not answer.

Not out of modesty. He genuinely went looking, the way a man opens a drawer expecting to find something, and there was nothing in the drawer. He said, honestly, I don't know, and everyone laughed because it sounded like a joke, and he laughed too, and it stayed with him for eleven days.

The thing he keeps coming back to is that he used to be quite specific. He used to want things. There was a jacket once he thought about for a month. There was a particular way he liked his coffee that he would go out of his way for. He can remember being a man with preferences the way you remember a house you lived in as a child.

Somewhere in the second year, wanting stopped being useful. There was no room for it and it only made things harder, so it got put down, the way you put down a bag when your hands are needed for something else.

He is not sad, exactly. He would not use that word and he would be uncomfortable if you did. He is functional, and reliable, and flat.

He has not sung in a car since 2023.

Now the rota is your handwriting, so stay here a minute, because there is something being handed to you and it is not a job.

You are not about to be told to cheer up. Not on this page and not by God. If somebody has already said you should try to be more positive to you in the last three years, you know exactly what that sentence does to a tired person, and there is none of it here.

There is only a question, asked gently, with no right answer required tonight.

What would you say if the drawer had something in it.

Nobody here is going to ask you to be joyful

Let us get the wrong version out of the room first, because it has done real damage and a lot of it was done by people who meant well.

There is a version of Christian joy that arrives as an instruction. Rejoice. Come on. Where is your victory. It lands on an exhausted person as one more item on a rota that is already full, and the tired man does the only thing a decent man can do with an instruction, which is to try, and now he is failing at joy on top of everything else.

That is not what the word means and it never was.

You are not being asked to produce anything tonight. Scripture says the joy of the LORD is your strength, and read the direction of travel in it: the joy belongs to Him and it becomes strength in you, which is the opposite of a demand made on an empty man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a thing like that in from outside rather than squeezing it out of you.

Joy in Scripture is almost never manufactured. It is received, or it is restored, or it arrives with somebody else and gets into the room that way. David asks God to restore the joy of His salvation, which is a request from a man who has none and knows exactly where it is kept.

You have not lost the part of you that can be glad. His word says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance and that He restoreth the soul, and a soul that gets restored is not a soul that was destroyed, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that work at whatever pace He does it.

The One who is already glad about you

Here is the verse, and it is one of the strangest in the Bible, because of who is doing the singing.

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

That is not a description of what God wants from you. It is a description of what God is doing about you. He rejoices. He rests in His love, which is an astonishing phrase for a God who does not get tired, and then He sings.

Three years of being the strong one and there has been singing over your head the entire time.

You are being rejoiced over right now, in your current state, at your current volume. Zephaniah 3:17 says He will joy over thee with singing, and the verse attaches no condition about the state of the person being sung over, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that land on a man who has not sung in a car since 2023.

Notice what that does to the arithmetic. If the joy in the room has to come from you, then a flat man is a problem to be fixed. If the joy in the room is already there and it belongs to God, then a flat man is simply a man who has not yet turned round and noticed.

You were somebody with preferences before all this, and God has never once mislaid that man. Scripture says He knoweth our frame and remembers that we are dust, Psalm 103:14, which means He is not surprised by what three years does to a person, and His Spirit has been holding the whole of you, including the parts currently out of service.

One honest word before the turn. If the flatness is heavier than tiredness, if it has weight to it and has been there a long time, that is worth saying out loud to one human being who can look at your face. Telling somebody is not weakness and it is not a failure of faith. God has always done a great deal of His work through people in rooms, and reaching for that help is a faithful thing, not a lesser one.