Still the One Who Leaves Early

She starts thinking about the coat at about a quarter to nine.

Not because she is bored and not because anybody has done anything. She likes these people. She was looking forward to it on Tuesday. Somewhere around a quarter to nine something in her begins gently and persistently locating the door, and by half past she is doing arithmetic about the drive.

She has been like this her whole life. She was like it in college and she was like it at nineteen and she was like it, according to her mother, at six.

She asked to be filled about three years ago and she has never regretted it and something did happen.

And she still wants to go home at nine.

What she has never said to anybody is what that has come to mean to her. It is not about parties. It is that she has watched people who genuinely want the room, who are still there at midnight and are not performing, and something in her has quietly decided that they are further in than she is.

She could name two of them. She does not resent either one and she would be horrified if they knew she thought about it.

The sentence, unsaid: if I loved people the way they do, I would want to stay.

You may know that quarter to nine. The coat, and the arithmetic, and what you have decided it says about you.

A quieted soul is the achievement

There is a very short psalm, three verses long, and the middle one is one of the strangest and most restful sentences in the book.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.Psalm 131:2

Read what is being reported. A man says that he has quieted himself, and he says it as an accomplishment. The psalm opens with him declining to occupy himself with great matters or things too high for him, and this is the state he arrives at.

And the image is a weaned child. Not a hungry one. A weaned child is one who is with its mother and is not crying for anything, which in that world was an older child, and the whole point of the picture is contentment without demand.

You are describing a state the psalms treat as arrived at, and Psalm 131:2 has a man report a quieted soul as an accomplishment rather than as a stage he needs to move past, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes three verses and lands them on a woman looking for her coat at a quarter to nine.

And notice who wrote it. That psalm is attributed to David, who was not, by any measure available, a man short of appetite for rooms. Whatever this is, it is not the psalm of somebody who could not manage a crowd.

Weaned is not less

Consider the picture more closely, because it will do the work if she lets it.

A weaned child in that culture is a child who has been through something. The weaning is a real loss at the time and there is real crying in it, and afterward the child sits with its mother without needing to be fed, which is a different and later kind of nearness.

The psalm uses that specifically to describe a soul that has stopped requiring the thing it used to require.

Which means quiet, in that verse, is not the absence of appetite. It is appetite that has been met and has settled, and a woman who wants to be at home by half past nine is not somebody with less capacity for people. She is somebody who has had enough, in the good sense of that phrase.

You have been reading a settled thing as an empty one, because the written word uses a weaned child rather than an unfed one and treats the quiet as the outcome, and His Spirit is what turns an image into permission to stop the comparison.

And notice what the psalm does not say. It does not say a person should aspire to be at the table at midnight. There is no verse anywhere ranking capacity for crowds, and the two people she can name are not a standard the Bible sets.

You were never being measured against anybody at midnight, and Psalm 131 sets the whole thing in a report about one soul rather than in a comparison, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who fills.

Three years is not a shortfall

Now the conclusion she has been quietly drawing, which is worth taking apart carefully because she is a careful person.

She assumed that being filled would change her appetite for company. That the Spirit of God in a person would produce a person who wanted the room, and that wanting the door at a quarter to nine indicated a smaller portion of something.

Nothing anywhere says that. There is no list of the appetites a filled person has and no verse describing an increased tolerance for late evenings as a mark of anything at all.

What she has actually been doing for three years is coming, and being genuinely present for four hours, and going home. Four hours of a woman who is fully there is not the runner up to five hours of somebody who is enjoying the room.

You have been fully present for the hours you were there, because Psalm 131:2 reports a quieted soul without one word of apology attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief rather than one more measurement.