It Stopped Being An Emergency

It used to be an emergency.

The first month, it was the only thing in your head. You could feel it in your chest when you woke up. You told somebody. You made a plan.

The fourth month, less. The seventh month, you noticed you were not noticing.

And now there is a stack of mail on the counter and you walk past it the way you walk past a chair, and the strange thing, the thing that should worry you more than it does, is that this feels almost like progress.

I want to look at that with you, because I think you have given it the wrong name.

You have been calling it acceptance. Some people call it peace, and there is even a version of this that sounds spiritual: I have stopped striving, I am trusting God with it.

You are not at peace with this, and quiet has never once been the same thing as settled.

And I am not going to tell you that anything about your month changes because you read this. I do not know your month.

What I want to do is get the alarm working again, gently, because an alarm that has been unplugged is not the same as a fire that has gone out.

A man talking to his own soul

There is a psalm where a man does something that almost nobody does out loud, and I think it is the exact thing you need.

He interrogates himself.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God. (Psalm 42:11, King James Version)

Why art thou cast down, O my soul.

That is a man turning around inside his own chest and asking a direct question of the part of him that has gone flat, and he does it twice in that psalm because once did not settle it.

You are permitted to ask your own soul a direct question, and a man speaking to himself in the second person has never once been an odd or unspiritual thing to do. Psalm 42:11 has a man doing exactly that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who preserved the question rather than the tidy answer.

Notice that he does not tell his soul to cheer up. He asks it why.

And then he does not wait for the answer. He gives it an instruction: hope thou in God. He takes the flatness seriously enough to question it and then refuses to let it run the day.

You have both of those available in the same ten minutes, and taking a question seriously has never once required staying inside it. The Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man from the question to the instruction, and it is written in Psalm 42:11 in that order and not the other way round.

Numbness is a cost, not a settlement

Let me be plain about what has actually happened over seven months, because I do not think it is a failure and I do not think it is peace.

An alarm that rings for a long time with nothing changing gets turned off. That is not a defect in you. That is what a nervous system does to keep a person functioning, and it kept you functioning, and it got you to work every day for seven months.

But there is a price, and the price is not paid in the mail on the counter.

The price is that the same switch that turned off the alarm turned off some other things. The interest in Saturday. The wanting to call anybody. The being able to taste much of anything.

You are paying for the quiet in a currency you never agreed to spend, and going flat about one thing has never once stayed limited to that one thing. The written word has a man noticing his own soul has gone down rather than pretending it has not, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that noticing possible.

And here is the part I would ask you to take seriously.

A person in this state does not usually need a bigger effort. A person in this state needs one small thing that is unmistakably a thing, so that the machinery starts turning over again.

Not a plan. Not a restructuring of your life. One line on a page.

You are able to do one small unmistakable thing today, and a single written line has never once been too little to restart something in a man. The Holy Spirit is the one who works at the size a person can actually manage, and Psalm 42:11 gives a flattened man one instruction and not twelve.

Open one envelope

I want to add something to the assignment, and it is optional, and I think you already know it is coming.

Open one of them. One envelope off that stack. Not all of them. One.

Because here is what the stack has become. It is no longer mail. It is a monument, and it is doing a job in that kitchen: every time you walk past it, it says the same sentence to you, which is that this is too big to touch.

You are walking past a thing that has been talking to you all week, and an unopened envelope has never once been silent. The Spirit of God is the one who brings a person back to a thing they have been going around, and the written word asks the soul a direct question instead of leaving it in the corner.

One line on a page. One envelope. And then you can stop.

And plainly, because this article would be dishonest without it. If the flatness has gone further than mail, if there are mornings you cannot see a reason to get up, or if a thought has started arriving about the people in your life being better off without you, that is not numbness and it is not something to sit with alone. Call or text 988, the crisis line, today, and tell a doctor, a counselor or a pastor you trust. That is the first thing on this page and not the last.

You are allowed to hand this to somebody qualified, and asking for that has never once been giving up on anything. Psalm 42:11 has a man refusing to leave his own soul unattended, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a real person within reach of somebody who has gone quiet.