The Joy in Every Room

When she walks in, the room comes up. It has been true since she was about seventeen.

Nobody taught her. It is not a technique. There is something about the way she arrives that changes the temperature of a place, and people have been telling her that for twenty years, and it is one of the things she likes about herself.

She has never been asked to do it. That is worth saying carefully. There was no meeting where she was assigned the job. It simply became the arrangement, the way these things become arrangements, and by about twenty five it was load bearing.

She is thirty nine.

What has happened over the last eight or nine months is that she has begun doing it on purpose.

That is the whole difference and nobody would be able to see it. She still walks in and the room still comes up. But there is now a moment in the car, before she goes in, where she gathers herself, and there is a decision in it, and the decision costs something that it never used to cost.

Last month at her cousin's she did it for four hours and then sat in the car afterward for eleven minutes before she started the engine.

She has not told anybody. Partly because there is nothing to tell that would not sound ungrateful, and partly because she does not know who she would tell it to. The people she would normally take a thing like this to are the people she does the lifting for.

The sentence, unsaid: I am running the room on the last of it and nobody can tell.

You may know that car. The gathering before you go in, and what it now costs.

Whose joy it is

There is a line everybody knows and almost nobody reads carefully, and the possessive in it is the whole thing.

For the joy of the Lord is your strength.Nehemiah 8:10

The joy of the Lord. Not your joy about the Lord. Not the joy a person is able to produce in a room. His.

That is not a small point of grammar. It changes who the supply belongs to. If the joy in that sentence is hers, then the strength it produces is only ever as good as her reserves, and a woman at the end of twenty years of lifting is in real trouble.

If it is His, then it is not being drawn from her at all, and the running out she has been hiding is a running out of the wrong thing.

You have been supplying something that was never yours to supply, and Nehemiah 8:10 puts the joy in God's possession rather than in the reader's performance, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a line shouted to a weeping crowd and lands it on a woman sitting in a car for eleven minutes.

The crowd it was said to was crying

Consider the scene, because the setting demolishes the way that verse is usually deployed.

Nehemiah eight is a day when the law is read aloud to people who have not heard it in generations, and the response of the crowd is that they weep. All of them. It goes on long enough that the leaders have to intervene.

And into that, into a field of crying people, somebody says do not be grieved, because the joy of the Lord is your strength.

That is not said to a room that is already up. It is said to people at the bottom, as a supply being announced rather than a mood being requested, and it is followed immediately by instructions to eat and drink and send portions to those who have nothing prepared.

You are being addressed at the bottom rather than at the top, because the written word gives that sentence to a weeping crowd rather than to a cheerful one, and the Spirit of God is what turns a famous line into something she can receive in a parked car.

And notice what comes with it. Food. The verse before it is about eating the fat and drinking the sweet, which is not a metaphor. The whole passage answers exhaustion with provision rather than with encouragement.

You are being handed provision and not a mood, and Nehemiah 8 puts eating and drinking in the same breath as the joy, and the same Spirit who has been called joy in the letters 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.

Twenty years of being the reason a room lifts, unasked, unpaid and now unsustainable, is a real load, and the fact that it looks like fun from the outside makes it heavier rather than lighter. Tell a doctor plainly about the eleven minutes in the car and the gathering beforehand, because a thing that used to be free and now costs is real information. Ask about a counselor, who is the one person in her life not depending on her to lift the room. And tell one friend the true sentence, in those words, and pick somebody who will not immediately try to cheer her up.

And if the flatness has begun going somewhere heavier than tiredness, 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.

Arriving somewhere without lifting it is not letting anybody down. You are held exactly as much on the night you walk in quiet as on the twenty years you carried the room, because Nehemiah 8:10 makes the joy God's own rather than the reader's output, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than only in the possessive.