The Joy I Could Not Feel This Morning

She made three people laugh before nine o'clock and she felt nothing during any of it.

The first was on the bus, an old man with a folded newspaper who said something about the weather and she gave him the thing she gives, and he laughed properly, out loud, and got off at the hospital stop looking better than he got on.

The second and third were at work, in the kitchen, over the fact that somebody had labeled a milk carton with their own name and a threat.

And in between, and underneath, and during, there was a flatness she woke up with at ten to six that she cannot account for, has not told anybody about, and which was still there at nine.

She is the one who brings the energy. Everybody says it. Her manager said it in her review, in writing. Two friends have separately told her they cannot be down around her, which is meant as the highest compliment and which she has begun to hear as a job description.

So this morning she performed a quality she could not locate in herself, three times, before nine, and it worked perfectly, and that is the part that frightens her.

You know that morning. Something people name in you arrived on schedule and you were not there for any of it.

Say what the flatness costs, before anything else

Nobody has counted this, and it is worth doing carefully.

It costs her the morning, obviously, but that is the smallest part.

It costs her the right to arrive anywhere flat. Everybody else in that building can have a bad start and be met with a coffee and a question. If she is flat it is an event, and by now she can feel that coming from the bus stop, so she does not risk it.

And it costs her a suspicion that has been growing since about March: that the joy is a performance and always has been, that everybody who loves her loves a routine, and that if the routine ever failed there would be nothing underneath it. That is the actual weight and she has told nobody.

You have been performing something you could not locate this morning, and God has never once met you at the level of the routine. Psalm 139:2 says He understands your thought from far off, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it on a bus at ten to six beside a woman with a flatness she woke up with. He was not one of the three people laughing.

The joy of the Lord, and whose joy it says it is

There is one line built for a woman who could not feel it this morning.

The joy of the Lord is your strength.Nehemiah 8:10

Almost everybody reads that as: your joy makes you strong, so cheer up. Read the first four words again. The joy of the Lord. It is His. That is a statement about ownership, and it is said to a crowd who at that exact moment were weeping and were being told not to.

Which means the strength on offer was never contingent on the crowd producing a feeling. It belonged to somebody else and was made available, and it is His Spirit who makes that a live sentence at ten to six rather than a slogan on a mug.

You have been running on a joy that was never yours to generate, and this morning proves the point rather than exposing you. That is not a way of talking somebody out of a hard morning. The written word attaches the joy to the Lord by name and hands over the strength, and the Spirit is the one who was making an old man on a bus laugh while a woman felt nothing.

And I want to say the plain thing, because the wrong comfort would ruin it. The relief here is not that you really are joyful underneath and this was a blip. It might not be a blip. The relief is that the thing everybody names in you was never on your account, so a flat morning is not a withdrawal from a balance you were supposed to be keeping.

What the routine actually is

There is a fear here and naming it is most of the work.

The fear is that she is hollow. That the laughing on the bus was mechanical, and that a woman who can produce joy she does not feel is a kind of machine, and that everybody who loves her loves the output.

You are not hollow, and a thing done without feeling is not automatically a thing done without truth. 2 Corinthians 4:7 says the treasure is in clay jars so that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes clay jar a description of ordinary construction rather than an accusation of fakery.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the flatness has been arriving more often, or if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before anybody at work. That is not the joy failing. That is God sending help with a face on it, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.