Applause Is Not a Meal

She was thanked four times on Thursday.

Once by name from the front, which she had not expected and which made her look at the floor. Once in the parking lot by a woman who caught her arm and held on for a second longer than the sentence needed. Once by text at ten forty. And once by the seventeen year old who is not good at saying things and said it anyway, badly, which was the one that got her.

All four were real. That is important and she would defend it. Nobody was being polite at her. Those were four people who meant it.

And she drove home hollow.

Not sad. She would push back hard on sad, because sad implies something went wrong and nothing went wrong. Thursday was a good day. What she means by hollow is that she got in the car at nine forty five feeling exactly the way she had felt getting in the car at four, with four warm sentences added to the day and nothing in her having moved.

She has noticed this before. She has been noticing it for about a year and a half, which is roughly how long she has been saying yes to everything.

The yeses are not the problem either, she thinks, or not exactly. She is good at what she does and it is worth doing. The problem is that somewhere along the way she started expecting the thanks to do something, and it does not do it, and she has run out of ideas about what would.

What she said out loud in the car on Thursday, to nobody, was one sentence. It came out flat and slightly surprised.

None of that fed me.

You may know that drive. Everything went right and you arrived home the same weight you left.

Appreciation and food are different things

Let us be careful, because there is a cheap version of this teaching and it would hurt her.

The cheap version says she should not need people's thanks, that wanting to be appreciated is vanity, and that a truly spiritual woman would be indifferent to it. That is not true and it is not kind. Being thanked is good. God made us to be seen by each other and He is not standing in the parking lot disapproving of a woman who liked hearing her name from the front.

The real distinction is smaller and much more useful. Appreciation and food are different substances.

Appreciation confirms. It tells her the work landed, that it was noticed, that she is not invisible, and all of that is worth having. But confirmation is information. It does not go into the tank. She can be perfectly and accurately confirmed all evening and drive home on empty, because nothing in a thank you was ever built to be poured into a person.

You are not greedy for wanting something the thanks could not give, and Psalm 107:9 names a longing soul and a hungry soul as two real conditions, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm written about people lost in a desert and lands it in a car in a church parking lot.

Here is the sentence.

For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.Psalm 107:9

Read who does the verbs. He satisfies. He fills. Both of them are His, and the soul in the sentence is doing exactly one thing, which is being hungry.

Hungry is the qualification

Look at the structure of that psalm, because the placement matters.

Psalm 107 is a list of people in trouble. Wanderers with no city. Prisoners. Fools who wrecked their own lives. Sailors in a storm. Four groups, and every one of them cries out, and every one of them gets answered, and the writer keeps repeating the same refrain about how good God is.

Verse 9 comes at the end of the first group, the ones wandering with nowhere to go. And what it says about them is not that they finally organized themselves. It says God satisfied them, and it names their condition as longing and hunger rather than as failure.

You have a condition and not a character flaw, because the written word puts hunger on the list of things God answers rather than the list of things He corrects, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from a comfort she reads into a thing she can stand on.

And the word goodness is worth stopping over. He does not fill the hungry soul with instruction. He does not fill it with a plan. He fills it with goodness, which is a word about His own nature, and there is no way to receive that from a person no matter how sincerely they thank you.

You have been trying to eat something that was never food, and Psalm 107 puts the filling and the goodness in the same clause and puts both in God's hands, and the same Spirit who wrote that over a desert is the one who says it over a Thursday.

Nothing about the emptiness disqualifies her

Now the thing she is bracing for, because she half expects to be told this is what she gets for saying yes so much.

Nobody is telling her that. Her yeses are not a debt she is now paying. Psalm 107 does not scold the wanderers for wandering before it feeds them. It records the hunger, it records the crying out, and then it records God doing something about it, in that order, with no lecture inserted anywhere.

And there is nothing in that psalm about a setting. No meeting is required. No one has to lay a hand on her. The wanderers were in the middle of nowhere with nobody, which is a fairly precise description of a car in a dark parking lot at nine forty five.

You were met in the desert and not at the destination, because Psalm 107 has God answering people who were nowhere near anything, and it is His Spirit who makes that an address rather than a nice piece of scenery.