The Room With The Table In It

The room had a table in it and eight chairs and a window that did not open, and she has been back in it every day since, in her head, for seven months.

It took two days. There were people there whose job it was to be fair, and as far as she can tell they were. There was a folder in front of the chair opposite with colored tabs down the side, and a jug of water nobody poured from. At about four on the second afternoon somebody said thank you for your time, and that was the end of twenty-two years.

She was a vet. Farm work mostly, then small animals when her back went, and then everything, because in a place that size you do the lot.

The fleece is still on the hook by the back door. It has the practice name on the chest and a hole in the cuff where her thumb went through, and she has taken it off that hook four times and put it back four times, and she has not tried to explain that to her husband.

Her certificate came off the hall wall a fortnight after. It is behind the wardrobe now, facing in. Nobody in the house has mentioned that either.

Seven months. The phone does not go at three in the morning any more, and she genuinely did not enjoy it going at three in the morning, and its silence is one of the worst things in this house. People stopped asking around month three, which she understands. Her old colleagues were awkward for a while and are now simply gone, apart from one who still sends a photograph of a dog she treated for years, and she does not know whether that is a kindness.

This afternoon she is at the kitchen table with a mug she has not drunk from. There is nothing wrong with the garden. There is a wren going up and down the fence and she is watching it the way people watch a television somebody else has on.

Her sister said on the phone at the weekend that she needs to find her joy again.

She said yes. She has been thinking about it since, and what she has arrived at is this: she does not think she is going to feel anything good again. Not because of a decision. It simply went out of the room with everything else, and she has started to arrange her life around its absence.

Maybe that is where you are. It is not the sharp part any more. It is the flat part, and you have quietly stopped expecting gladness to come back.

What the word means before I use it

I will define the word this site is named for before I put anything under it, because at seven months a vague promise is worse than none at all.

Abundance means fullness of life. It does not mean money, it does not mean the license back, and it does not mean a version of a life that photographs well. Fullness of life, poured into a person, in the life they have actually got. If some part of you arrived here half hoping the word meant something you could take to a bank, that is an ordinary hope and I am not going to be clever about it.

You have that fullness now, at seven months, in a kitchen with a mug you have not drunk from, and it is not a payment for coping. It is John 10:10, the Shepherd's own word for what He came to hand over, and the Holy Spirit brings it to a woman watching a wren on a fence.

Joy is poured, not produced

Your sister was not wrong to want it for you. She was wrong about where it comes from, and almost everybody is.

Isaiah calls it the oil of joy, and oil in that sentence is something poured over somebody by somebody else. It is not extracted from the person. Nobody in that verse is asked to locate their joy, or find it again, or work back to it by remembering better days. The mourning ones stand still and it is poured.

Notice as well who is standing in that verse. Mourning people. Not recovered people, not people who have processed it, not people who have come out the other side and can talk about it calmly now. Mourning ones, with the mourning still on them, and the oil goes onto exactly those heads.

to give unto them the oil of joy for mourningIsaiah 61:3

And the letter of James says the same thing from the other end: every good gift and every perfect gift comes down, from above, from the Father of lights. Down. It has a direction, that direction is not upward out of anybody, and it never was.

That matters enormously at seven months, because the instruction to find your joy is an instruction to manufacture something, and a person in your position cannot manufacture it, and then the failure to manufacture becomes one more thing that is wrong with them.

You are not disqualified from gladness by how long this has taken, and that is not my sympathy talking. James 1 puts every good gift in the Father's hands rather than in anybody's capacity to feel it, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a poured thing into a person who has stopped expecting anything.

What I am not going to promise you

I am not going to tell you when it comes, or that a morning is coming when you wake up different.

I do not know that, and nobody who says it to you knows it. It matters because a promise like that, made and not kept, does more damage than the silence it was trying to fill, and there have been enough people filling silences already.

I am also not going to offer gladness as a swap for what is gone. The twenty-two years are gone. The register is what it is. Joy is not compensation, it was never meant to stand in for the thing that was lost, and anybody who presents it that way has turned God into somebody who settles claims.

You are not being judged for the flatness, and I am not softening anything to say so. Scripture keeps whole passages written by people who could feel nothing and said so out loud, God kept every one of them in the book, and the Holy Spirit did not withdraw from a single one of those writers while they were saying it.

Receiving is a posture, not an achievement

There is a reason the physical thing on this page is opening your hands rather than reaching.

Reaching is what a person does when a thing has to be got. Opening is what a person does when the thing is being handed over. And for seven months the reaching has almost certainly been constant, or it has stopped altogether, and both of those are exhausting in different ways.

You have hands that can be opened, and that is all that is required here, and I am not being poetic. It is written all through the Scriptures that God gives to people who are simply present with their hands out, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the pouring rather than something anybody has to be ready for.