Poured Out on Carpet Tiles

Wednesday afternoon, twenty past three, and there is nothing in this room and nothing in her.

Eleven desks. Carpet tiles the color of nothing. A window at the far end that gets sun for about forty minutes in the summer and none at all now. Somebody's radio on so low that it is not music, it is just an absence of silence.

She is at the fourth desk from the door and she has been at that desk for four years.

Seven months since anything moved.

She is precise about the number because she has checked it against a calendar, which she suspects is not a good sign. Seven months since she felt anything about God, in a service, at home, in a car, anywhere.

Nothing happened. That is the part that makes it difficult to explain to anybody. Her life is fine. Nothing broke and nobody died and she did not stop doing anything. It simply went quiet, in about the second week of a February, and it has not come back.

And what she has settled into, without deciding to, is waiting for conditions. For a good service. For a week away. For a song that does something. For the sort of atmosphere in which, in her experience, this kind of thing happens.

She is at an open plan desk on a Wednesday and there is not one of those things anywhere in the building.

The sentence, unsaid: nothing about this room is going to help me.

You may know that afternoon. Nothing wrong anywhere, and nothing in you, and nothing around you to work with.

The only condition named is the thirst

There is a line in Isaiah where God says what He is going to do and names exactly who it lands on, and the naming is worth reading slowly.

For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring.Isaiah 44:3

Read the two recipients in the first half. Him that is thirsty. The dry ground.

That is the whole qualification. Not the prepared. Not the well situated. Not somebody in the right room on the right evening. Thirst, and dryness, which are the two things she has plenty of and the two things she has been treating as the obstacle.

You are described by both halves of that verse, and Isaiah 44:3 names the thirsty and the dry ground as the recipients rather than as the problem, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a promise made to a worn out people and lands it on a woman at the fourth desk from the door.

The dryness is the address

Consider how strange the second clause is if you read it as most people do.

Floods upon the dry ground. Not floods upon the fertile ground, which would make agricultural sense and would be a picture of blessing on something already going well. He picks the ground that has nothing, and He does not send a sprinkling to it. He sends floods.

Which means the dryness in that verse is functioning as an address rather than as a condition to be cleared up first. The water goes where the dry is, because that is what water is for.

And notice that nowhere in the sentence is the ground asked how it got that way. There is no clause about whether the dryness was deserved or self inflicted or simply the weather. The verse is uninterested in the cause and entirely interested in the location, which is exactly the opposite of how a person spends seven months thinking about their own.

You have been reading an address as an obstruction, because the written word puts the floods on the dry ground and never asks the ground to improve before they arrive, and His Spirit is what turns a piece of irrigation language into something a woman can use on a Wednesday.

And notice that the parallel in the second half makes it explicit. I will pour water. I will pour my Spirit. The same verb twice, in the same sentence, with the second half interpreting the first.

You are inside a verse that says Spirit where it said water, and Isaiah 44 repeats the pouring and names the Spirit in the second line, and the same Spirit named there is the one who fills.

And the word poured is worth one more moment, because it is not a word about a delivery arriving at a scheduled time. Pouring is what happens when the vessel is tipped and the whole of it comes out at once, and a person who has been rationing themselves for seven months on the memory of a February is being offered something the prophet describes in terms of flooding.

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.

Seven months of nothing, checked against a calendar, carried alone because there is nothing to point at, is a real weight and it is the kind that goes entirely unreported. Tell a doctor plainly that things stopped registering in February and have not restarted, in those words, because a sustained flatness with no cause attached is medical information and is frequently treatable. Ask about a counselor, and say the sentence about checking the calendar out loud to somebody trained to hear it. And tell one person you trust, and warn them in advance that nothing is wrong, so that they do not spend the conversation looking for the cause.

And if the nothing 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 out loud is not making it worse. You are held exactly as much in the seven months as in any month you felt something, because Isaiah 44:3 makes thirst and dryness the recipients and never once the disqualification, and it is His Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than only in a promise.