Joyful in the Room, Flat in the Kitchen

The gathering had finished about twenty minutes earlier and the hall was doing what halls do, emptying slowly and loudly, and Tess was somewhere in the middle of it with a stack of chairs going up beside her and her sleeves pushed back, laughing at something Ivo had said that was not even particularly funny.

Somebody going past with a tray called out that Tess was always so joyful, honestly, every week, where does she get it.

And Tess said, without thinking about it at all, "Not on Tuesdays."

It landed oddly, the way a true thing does when it arrives in a light voice. Ivo put down the chair he was holding.

"Go on."

"It is not a complaint," she said. "It is just true. In here I mean every word of it. I am not performing, I promise you I am not. And then Tuesday morning at ten past seven I am at the sink and I do the exact same things I do in here, the same God, the same praying, the same obedience, and I feel absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Like a woman filling in a form."

She stacked another chair.

"And I have decided that Tuesday is the real one. That this," and she waved her hand at the hall, the lights, the last of the band packing down at the front, "is me being carried by forty other people and a good keyboard player, and Tuesday is me with the scaffolding taken away."

Ivo is seventy-one and has been stacking chairs in that hall since before she was born.

"Both of them are you," he said. "And I will tell you something else for nothing. Both of them are obedience. One of them just happens to have a band in it and forty people singing the same line at once. You are not two women, love. You are one woman in two rooms, and only one of the rooms has the volume turned up."

Tess stood there with a chair half lifted and started laughing again, differently this time, and the light was coming in flat and gold across the floor where the chairs had been, and she did not have to fix a single thing to be allowed to laugh.

And you know both of those rooms. You have a Sunday self who is entirely sincere and a Tuesday self who feels like a fraud, and you have quietly concluded that the flat one is the true reading and the glad one is the show. That is not what is happening. Let us go and look at what the terms actually say about gladness, because they say something surprising and almost nobody quotes it.

One woman, two rooms

Start with the honest mechanics of it, because a great deal of unnecessary grief lives in this exact gap.

A room with a band in it, and forty people, and a shared line sung out loud, does something to a human being that a kitchen at ten past seven cannot do and was never built to do. That is not fakery. It is what a gathering is for. The volume is genuinely higher in there, and so the feeling is genuinely higher, and when you walk out into a Tuesday the volume drops back to normal, and the drop is not a diagnosis.

Now here is the line that gets misread more than almost any other on this subject.

For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.1 John 5:3

Read what it is describing. It is describing the commandments. It is not grading your Tuesday. He is telling you the weight of the thing He is asking, and the weight is not crushing, and that is a statement about His terms and not a measurement of how much you enjoyed obeying them this morning.

So the flat morning is not evidence against you. You are inside a covenant whose own terms are described as not burdensome, and I am not offering you my opinion of your Tuesday, I am reading you 1 John 5:3, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line like that and quietly removes it from the pile of things you are being measured by.

The One who is glad first

Now the part that turns this whole subject on its head, and it is God speaking, in the first person, about His own feelings.

I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.Jeremiah 32:40 and 41

Sit with that middle clause for a moment. I will rejoice in doing them good. Not I will tolerate. Not I will grimly keep My word. He committed Himself, in writing, to being delighted about it, with all His heart and all His soul, which is the phrase He asks of us and here uses of Himself first.

That is what He bound Himself to. So the delight in this covenant does not begin with you, and it is not the entry fee at the door. You have a God who signed for the gladness before He ever mentioned yours, and Jeremiah 32:41 is where it is written down, and the Spirit is how a person comes to feel at home in a house like that.

A flat obedience is still obedience

Now let me say something plainly, because this category is where people get quietly hurt.

If you obeyed this morning with no feeling at all, you obeyed. That is not a lesser act. It is not a technicality that God accepts with a sigh. Nowhere in the terms is delight listed as the required emotional condition of a valid obedience, and any voice telling you that your flat Tuesday did not count is not reading from this document.

Delight is where obedience is going. It is not the toll you pay at the entrance. A woman who keeps her word to God on a morning when she feels nothing has done something quite considerable, and it is not measured by how much she enjoyed it.

So here is the sentence this whole site exists to say plainly, and it belongs here in the middle of the teaching rather than at the bottom in small type. God's oath is the settled half. His everlasting covenant, His refusal to turn away, His own gladness in doing you good, all of that is finished and holds without any contribution from you, including the contribution of enthusiasm. Your response is the other half. It is genuinely asked, it genuinely matters, and it is not the thing holding the covenant up.

You were never asked to arrive at the sink already feeling something. You were asked to keep His word, and Jeremiah 32:40 has God binding Himself to a covenant He will not turn away from, which is why the Holy Spirit meets a person on a flat Tuesday exactly as readily as in a full hall.