The Second Half of the Verse

There is nothing left in her, and in about ninety seconds forty people are going to applaud.

She has not slept properly since the spring. She put the blue blouse on because deciding between two blouses was more than she had in her this afternoon, and now she is on a folding chair at the end of the second row with a plastic cup of squash she has not touched, in a club room with a low ceiling and a strip of bunting somebody put up for a different evening entirely.

The chairman is doing the thank yous. He is a kind man and he means every word. He gets to her name, and then he says the thing, the thing that gets said, in exactly the tone it always gets said in: honestly, I do not know how she does it. She is a wonder.

And they clap. Properly, warmly, forty people who like her. Somebody near the door does a small whoop. She stands up because it would be worse not to, and the applause goes on for a few seconds longer than she can hold her face for, and she sits down.

Here is the sentence she cannot say back, and you know it, because you have one too. There is nothing left in here. Whatever they are looking at, it is not coming out of me, and I have not got any more of it.

You have stood up in that room. Maybe it was a ward, or a school gate, or a staff meeting where somebody said you were amazing and you had to do the face. And the loneliest part of it is not the exhaustion. It is that everybody thinks they have just seen you.

The verse the room only knows half of

There is one line in the Psalms that sits exactly where that folding chair is, and almost everybody quotes the first half of it.

I am as a wonder unto many, but You are my strong refuge.Psalm 71:7

Read what the man is doing there. He agrees with the room. Yes, people cannot account for me. Yes, I am the odd one, the strange sign, the thing nobody can explain. He does not argue with the observation at all. He simply refuses to let it end there, and he swings the whole sentence round to God in one word: but. The Holy Spirit left that hinge in the middle of the verse on purpose.

That word is the hinge of this entire thing. The wonder is a fact people can see. The refuge is the reason, and the refuge is not on display to anybody, because a shelter is only ever known from the inside.

You are inside a refuge right now, and being inside it is what those people have been mistaking for strength. That is not my flattering theory about you. The written word puts the refuge in the same breath as the wonder and gives the second half all the weight, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding a person up in a place where their own reserves ran out months ago. Nobody in that room clapped for the right thing, and that is not their fault. They cannot see walls.

Name the cost, and name it first

Before anything else gets said, let me say the part the evening skipped.

This has cost you. It has cost you sleep and it has cost you the version of yourself that used to find things funny. It has cost you the freedom to answer a simple question honestly, because the honest answer would frighten people and then you would have to look after them about it. Being visible is its own separate exhaustion, laid on top of the first one, and almost nobody counts it.

You have been carried through months that you did not have the resources to survive. Scripture says the eternal God is a dwelling place and underneath are the everlasting arms, and it is His Spirit who makes that a lived thing rather than a lovely phrase. What has been holding you is not your character. Your character is tired.

And I want to be plain about something, because this site would be a cruelty otherwise. Your hard year is not a display. It was not arranged so that a room of forty people could learn something from watching you. God did not put you through the spring to make a point to the club. You are not an exhibit and you never were.

Two things a worn out person has to hear

The first is that God still shelters people. Not sheltered, in the Psalms, in a poetic sort of way. Shelters. If refuge is only a metaphor from an older world, then this is unusually good coping, the applause was right, and there is nowhere to go with any of it.

The second is that it is this shelter, over you, now. Not over stronger believers. Not over people with better mornings.

You have a refuge that was given to you rather than earned by you, and it does not withdraw on the days you have nothing. The word says He is a refuge in the day of trouble and knows those who take shelter in Him, and His Spirit is the one who makes that knowing something you feel rather than something you concede. It is not conditional on how well you performed this week.

And the mountain here is not your circumstances. It is the audience: the low steady obligation to keep answering them, to keep having a face for it, to be as fine as they have decided you are. Jesus never made moving a mountain depend on the strength of what you feel about it. He hung it on the mouth. Speak to it, He said. So the thing to speak to tonight is the room, and then to stop speaking to it.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the emptiness has stopped being tiredness and gone somewhere frightening, 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 you tell anybody at that club. That is not the shelter failing. That is the shelter arriving with a face and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.