A Full Calendar and a Dry Room

Her calendar this week has eleven things on it and she wants to be at nine of them.

That is worth saying first because everything else will be misread without it. She is not overcommitted in the way people mean when they say that with a certain look on their face. She has thought about it. She has said no to things. What is on there is on there because it is good and because she chose it.

Tuesday is a friend she has known for twenty years. Wednesday is something she helps run and genuinely enjoys. Thursday is her nephew.

And since about February there has been an empty room in her.

She noticed it first at a dinner in the spring. Twelve people, all of them people she likes, a conversation she would normally be in the middle of, and she was aware, distinctly, of watching it from about four feet behind her own face.

It has not gone. It has become the normal condition and she has become good at operating from four feet back, which frightens her more than the original noticing did.

She has not said this to anybody, and the reason is specific. Every person she would tell has watched her diary for years. The response would be that she is doing too much. And that answer is not true, and she would then have to spend the conversation defending things she loves.

The sentence, unsaid: nothing on this calendar is the problem and there is nothing in the room.

You may know that week. Everything good, and something hollow behind it.

The promise is to people who cannot find water

There is a line in Isaiah that describes a very precise condition and it has nothing to do with how a life looks from outside.

When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them.Isaiah 41:17

Read the condition being described. Not idleness. Not a life gone wrong. People who are looking for water and finding none, whose thirst has got as far as their tongue.

That is a description of the searching rather than of the circumstances. Nothing in it says anything about what those people's weeks looked like or how much they had on.

You are described by that verse regardless of how full the week is, and Isaiah 41:17 defines the condition as seeking water and finding none rather than as an empty or badly arranged life, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a promise made to an exhausted people and lands it on a woman four feet behind her own face at a dinner.

The response is immediate and it is God's

Consider the shape of the second half, because it does something unusual.

I the Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. Two clauses, both beginning with I, both naming God explicitly, which is emphatic in a way that does not survive well into English. He is putting His own name on the response twice in one sentence.

And what He commits to is hearing and not forsaking. There is no instruction issued to the poor and needy anywhere in that verse. They are not told to look somewhere else, or to simplify, or to try harder at finding the water.

You have been answered without being instructed, because the written word puts the whole response in God's hands and hands the seeker no task at all, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from a lovely construction into something she can use on a Tuesday.

And notice the two words He uses for them. Poor and needy. That is not a comment on their bank balances in this context. It is the vocabulary of somebody with nothing available to them, which is exactly the state of a woman with eleven good things on a calendar and nothing in the room behind her face.

You are poor in the sense that verse means, and Isaiah 41 uses the language of having nothing available rather than the language of having nothing on, and the same Spirit who spoke that over people in exile is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one person

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Eight months of watching her own life from four feet back, while running a full and genuinely good week and telling nobody, is a real weight, and the fact that nothing is wrong is precisely what makes it hard to say. Tell a doctor plainly about the four feet, in those words, because that particular description is well known to people who are trained and is not a character report. Ask about a counselor, and pick somebody who has never seen her diary, which removes the whole conversation she has been dreading. And tell one friend the true sentence, and tell them in advance that the answer is not that she is doing too much.

And if the hollowness has begun going somewhere heavier, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Saying it is not canceling anything. You are held exactly as much in the week you say it as in the eight months you did not, because Isaiah 41:17 defines the condition by the thirst and never by the schedule, and it is His Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than only in a promise.