Does He Take It When I Feel Nothing

The drummers always bring the kit outside afterward, which takes four men and a great deal of unnecessary shouting, and by the time it is set up under the trees there are eleven children standing around it waiting for something to happen.

Novella was helping, in the way a person helps who is really there for the company. She had a folding chair in one hand and she was laughing at Brother Deshaun, who has been on that kit for forty years and has opinions about where it goes.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, in the ordinary way a person says a thing they have been carrying, she said it.

"I sang every word this morning." She was still smiling. "Every word. And I did not feel one of them."

Deshaun did not stop what he was doing. He put the crash where he wanted it and tightened the wing nut and said, without looking up:

"You think I feel it every Sunday?"

Then he sat down on the throne and hit the snare twice to hear the room, and he told her, in about six sentences, about the three years after his brother died. Three years of Sunday mornings where he came, and set up, and played every song correctly, and felt absolutely nothing while he did it. He said his hands knew the music and his heart was somewhere else entirely and he could not get the two of them into the same building.

Novella asked him what he did.

And he said: I came back the next week.

She asked if it ever came back.

And he said yes, on an ordinary Sunday in the fall, halfway through a song he had played a hundred times, and it came back into hands that had kept the rhythm the whole time it was gone.

Then the bass player arrived and the whole conversation ended in noise and children.

But Novella stood there holding the folding chair for a second longer than she needed to.

And you have been standing there too, with something in your hand, for longer than you needed to.

Because you sang every word this morning. Or you prayed, or you drove to the place, or you did the kind thing you always do, and there was nothing in your chest while you did it. And it has made you quietly afraid, in a way you have never said out loud, that the real you is the numb one, and the singing was just a performance you have gotten good at.

You want to know one thing and nobody has ever answered it straight for you.

Does He take it when I feel nothing.

Sit down. He does, and I am going to show you where that is written.

Where the feeling was supposed to come from

Start here, because the whole question turns on it: in this covenant, whose job is the heart?

And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.Ezekiel 11:19

Read who is doing the verbs. I will give. I will put. I will remove. Not one of those is assigned to you. God bound Himself, in the first person, to the interior work, which means the condition of your heart is on His side of this document rather than yours.

Now hear this next part carefully, because tender women get hurt right here. The heart of stone in that verse is not a woman who feels flat on a Tuesday. A stone heart in Ezekiel is a heart that will not respond at all, that cannot be moved and does not want to be. A woman who gets up with nothing in her tank and sings anyway has just responded. That is the opposite of stone. She is doing the very thing a stone cannot do.

So you are not a hard-hearted woman having a spiritual failure, you are a responsive woman having a flat morning, and Ezekiel 11:19 puts the making of the heart in God's own hands rather than in yours, and it is His Spirit doing that interior work at a depth your feelings do not report on.

Delight is where obedience is going

Let me say the thing this category exists to say, and then let me protect you from the way it usually gets said.

Obedience inside this covenant is meant to become delight. It genuinely is. There is a life on the other side of duty where the thing you do because you must turns into the thing you would not miss, and that is not sentimental talk, it is the direction of travel for everybody God has ever brought home.

But delight is where obedience is going. It is not the toll you pay on the way in.

Which means you have already been let in, and the warmth is what the room does to a person once she is inside it. Nowhere in these terms is a temperature written down as the condition of the doorway, and it is the Spirit who turns duty into gladness, in His own time and by His own working rather than by the force of yours.

Nowhere in these terms does God make the feeling the requirement. Nowhere does He say bring Me your obedience, and bring it warm, or do not bother coming. Deshaun came for three years with his hands working and his heart somewhere else, and every one of those Sundays was real obedience, and I will not have anybody tell that man he wasted three years.

And here is where the halves sit, said plainly, in the middle of the teaching where it belongs. God's half is settled: He swore to give the new heart and He is the one working it. Your half is a response, and it is real, and it is genuinely asked, and the temperature of it was never a term.

You are giving Him something real on the flat mornings, and this is not me being nice to you: 2 Timothy 2:13 says that when we are faithless He remains faithful because He cannot deny Himself, and the Spirit is the One holding your covenant steady in a season when your feelings are not holding anything at all.

What He does not do

He does not grade your motives at the door. That needs saying out loud in this category, because a great many good people have been taught to audit themselves before they pray and have then decided not to pray at all rather than pray badly.

You were never asked to sort out why you are coming before you come. You were asked to come. The mixed motive, the tired motive, the I am only here out of habit motive, the I do not want to be here motive that showed up anyway: God has been receiving people in exactly that condition since the beginning, and Ezekiel 11:19 has Him promising to fix the inside rather than demanding that you arrive with it fixed, and His Spirit does that work in people who keep turning up.

And a slow return is not a failed one. Deshaun's came back on an ordinary Sunday in the fall with no warning and no ceremony, and the coming back was not a reward for endurance. It was simply what God had already committed Himself to doing.