The Radio Is On and I Am Not

She has been the first one up her whole life.

At weddings. In kitchens. In the parking lot outside a store one time when a song came on in somebody's car, which her sister still tells people about. It was never a decision. Something in her heard a rhythm and her body went, and she has been that person since before she can remember being anything.

She is forty three.

Since about January she has been sitting down.

Nobody has said anything, which she finds interesting, and she has worked out why. She still smiles. She still claps on the offbeat because that is automatic. From across a room she looks exactly the way she has always looked, and there is a version of this where nobody ever finds out.

But the radio is on in the kitchen most mornings and she is at the counter and there is nothing.

She has tried the ones that have never failed. The one from her wedding. The one her father used to play. Nothing has failed her exactly, and nothing has done anything, and after eleven months she has stopped putting them on to see.

Here is what she has never said to anybody, and it is not about the music. Music is the least of it. It is that the dancing was how she knew.

The sentence, unsaid: if that is gone, I do not know how I would tell whether anything is left.

You may know that kitchen. The song playing, and you at the counter, not moving.

Every verb in the verse is His

There is a line in a psalm about exactly this transaction, and the striking thing about it is the grammar.

Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.Psalm 30:11

Read who does what. The turning is His. The taking off is His. The girding is His. Three verbs, all three of them God doing something, and the man in the sentence is on the receiving end of every one.

He does not turn his own mourning. He does not take off his own sackcloth. He does not work up gladness and put it on. The whole of it is done to him, and he reports it afterward, which is the only part he contributes.

You are the object of all three verbs and never the subject, and Psalm 30:11 gives the turning and the girding entirely to God, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a psalm of dedication and lands it on a woman standing at a kitchen counter with the radio on.

Girded is a strange word to choose

Consider the third verb, because it is oddly physical and it is the one that will reach her.

To gird is to fasten something around a person, usually at the waist, usually so that they can move. It is what you did before work or before running. It is not decoration. It is a preparation of the body for motion, done by tying something on.

And the psalm says God girds a person with gladness, which means gladness is being described as something fastened onto somebody from outside, so that they can move, rather than as something generated on the inside and expressed.

You are being fastened into something rather than asked to produce it, because the written word makes gladness a garment tied on by God rather than a mood worked up by the wearer, and the Spirit of God is what turns an old physical verb into something a woman can receive at a counter.

And notice what comes off first. Sackcloth. He does not gird gladness over the top of it, which would be a costume. He removes one thing and then fastens the other, in that order, and both actions are His.

You were never asked to take the first thing off yourself, and Psalm 30 has God remove the sackcloth before He ties anything on, 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.

Eleven months of sitting still, hidden behind a smile that still works from across a room, with a private conclusion about what it means, is a real weight and it is exactly the kind nobody notices. Tell a doctor plainly that things which used to move her have stopped, in those words, and mention that it has been eleven months, because loss of pleasure in what a person has always loved is a well known and treatable signal and it is not a character report. Ask about a counselor, and say the last sentence out loud to them, the one about not knowing how she would tell. And tell her sister, who has been telling that parking lot story for twenty years and would want to know.

And if the stillness 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 losing the dancing. You are held exactly as much in the eleven months you sat down as in the forty three years you got up, because Psalm 30:11 puts every verb in God's hands and none in the hands of the one being girded, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that true in the body rather than only in the grammar.