I Left the Whole Room Behind

Nine hundred and forty miles, and he can tell you the number because he drove it in two days with the back seat full.

The job is good. He wants to be clear about that before anything, because when he says any of this out loud people assume he regrets it and he does not. It was the right move and he would make it again, and it is better money and better work and there is a future in it that there was not before.

He has been here fourteen months.

What he left is harder to name than the people. He left a room. His aunt's front room, where about thirty of them ended up most Sundays, and the sound of it, and the way somebody was always talking over somebody else at the far end of it, and the fact that he did not have to arrange to be there. He simply went.

He calls. Twice a week and more. The calls are good and they are not the room.

Here is the thing he has told nobody at either end.

He has been dry since the first week. Not homesick, though there is some of that. Dry. He goes on Sundays here to a perfectly good place with perfectly kind people and he stands in it and there is nothing.

He has assumed for fourteen months that this is the price of the move and that it will lift when he settles, and it has not lifted, and he has recently begun to wonder whether it was ever going to.

The sentence, unsaid: I brought everything except whatever it was that used to run in me.

You may know that move. The right decision, and something that did not come with you.

Sowing and tears in the same clause

There is a short psalm about people coming back from a long way away, and it contains one of the plainest sentences in the book about doing something in a bad state.

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.Psalm 126:5

Read the preposition. In tears. Not despite them, and not after they stop.

Sowing is what you do at the start of a season when there is nothing to show and nothing to eat and you are putting good grain into the ground on the strength of a future you cannot see. It is already the hardest month of the farming year. And the psalm describes people doing it while weeping, and it does not treat that as a complication.

You are permitted to sow in exactly the state you are in, and Psalm 126:5 puts the sowing and the tears in a single clause without one word suggesting the tears should be dealt with first, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a song about people a long way from home and lands it on a man in an apartment nine hundred miles from his aunt's front room.

The whole psalm is about displacement

Consider what Psalm 126 is actually about, because the setting is his exactly.

It opens with people who have been brought back from somewhere else, and it says that when it happened they were like men who dreamed. And then, halfway through, it turns and asks God to do it again, which tells you the return was not complete and that the people singing it were still partly out there.

That is a psalm written by somebody in the middle of a move that has not finished. It is not a song of arrival. It is a song sung on the road with the destination visible and the feet not there yet.

You are inside a psalm written from the middle of a relocation, because the written word has the singers ask for a further turning while they are still in transition, and the Spirit of God is what turns a piece of history into a place a man can stand in a kitchen with boxes still against the wall.

And notice that the sowing is happening at all. The people in that verse are not waiting for conditions. They are in the field, doing the ordinary work of the season, with wet faces, and the psalm records both facts without apology.

You are already doing the work of the season, and Psalm 126 has people sowing while weeping and calls it sowing, and the same Spirit who preserved that song is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one man

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

Fourteen months in a new city with no room to walk into unannounced, dry since the first week and telling nobody at either end, is real isolation and it is doing something whether or not it is being felt. Tell a doctor plainly about the fourteen months, in those words, because a sustained flatness after a relocation is common and is medical information rather than a character report. Ask about a counselor, and pick one here rather than back home, so that the conversation is about the life he is actually in. And tell one person in this new place the true sentence, and do it before he tells anybody at home, because the people here are the ones who can put a room around him.

And if the dryness 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 here is not disloyalty to there. You are held exactly as much in the month you say it as in the fourteen you did not, because Psalm 126:5 records the sowing and the tears together and never asks anybody to sort themselves out first, and it is His Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than only in a psalm.