Nobody Would Call This A Fire

Iona has never once been able to say what it is, and she has tried twice.

Both times she got about two sentences in and heard how it sounded, and both times she finished the thought with something like anyway, it is nothing, honestly, and the other person was relieved and they talked about something else.

It is not an illness. Nobody has died. There is no crisis, no diagnosis, no event, no anniversary that anybody would mark.

It is a thing that has been going on for eleven years and it takes up a great deal of her.

And if she described it to you now, plainly, you would probably think, and you would be too polite to say: is that all it is?

That is the whole problem, and it is not a small one. There is a rank order of suffering that everybody carries around without ever agreeing to it, and Iona's thing is not on it. There is no shelf for it. Which means she cannot put it down anywhere, because putting a thing down requires a surface, and there is no surface for a hard thing that people would not recognize as hard.

So she carries it, and she carries the additional weight of thinking she should not need to.

That second weight is heavier than the first now. She has worked that out. She spent about six years being burned by the thing and five more being ashamed of being burned by it, and the shame has more heat in it than the original.

She is forty-four.

And the sentence that comes, generally in the evening, is not why me. It is smaller and it is worse.

This does not even count, and I am in it on my own.

You may know that wall.

Maybe yours is something you could not explain either. Maybe you have started twice and stopped twice. Maybe you have watched somebody go through something visibly enormous and felt, on top of everything, guilty for being tired.

I am not going to rank it

Let me say the first thing straight, because it is the thing you are braced for.

I am not going to tell you it is worse than you think, in order to qualify you. And I am not going to tell you other people have it harder, which you already know and which has never once helped anybody.

I am not doing the ranking at all. Not upward and not downward.

Whatever is burning you has been burning you for eleven years, and eleven years is eleven years, and that is not a claim about where it sits on a list because I am not keeping a list.

I am also not going to tell you God sent it, or that there is a lesson in it, or ask what you are supposed to be learning. That question, put to a woman who cannot even name the thing, would be a small cruelty in a nice coat.

And I am not going to promise you it lifts. I do not know.

One thing.

Where the dark is not a different country

There is a passage in Psalm 139 where the writer tries to imagine somewhere he could be that God is not, and he gets to the dark, and this is what happens.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:11-12

Both alike to thee.

He does not say the dark is fine. He does not say the writer is imagining it, or that it is a small dark, or that it will be light by morning.

He says the dark is not a different country to God. It has no capacity to conceal, and there is no adjustment He has to make to be present in it, and therefore no threshold of seriousness a thing has to cross before it registers.

Which is the whole point for you. Your thing has been below everybody's threshold for eleven years.

He does not have one.

And the thing you cannot name does not need to be named for Him to be in it. The written word makes the darkness and the light alike to Him with no distinction of scale anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has stopped twice at two sentences.

And there is no minimum size of trouble He attends. The word says he healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds, and the same psalm goes straight on to say he telleth the number of the stars, and the Spirit is the one who makes both of those the same God on the same afternoon.

The second weight

Now let me deal with the shame, because you have correctly identified it as the heavier one and nobody has ever helped you with it.

The shame is doing something specific. It is telling you that your response is out of proportion to your circumstance, and therefore the fault is in you rather than in the circumstance.

That is a mechanism, and once you see it you can see it working.

But notice what it requires. It requires a scale, and it requires you to be a reliable judge of where your own thing sits on it, and you are not, because nobody is, because we cannot see inside anybody else's eleven years either.

And you are not required to justify the size of what you are carrying. The word says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart and specifies nothing about how it broke, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than assessing a claim.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to somebody whose main charge against herself is that she should be coping better.