I Felt Nothing And Decided What It Meant

Her hands are at her sides and the room is fully alive around her and she is doing arithmetic about herself.

A Sunday morning with everything working. Four hundred people, a room that has warmed up in the way rooms do, that particular sound a lot of voices make when they are actually going for it rather than being polite. A woman two rows in front with her hands up who is plainly not thinking about anybody. Somebody at the back with a small child on his shoulder, both of them swaying, the child asleep.

And she is standing in the middle of it with her hands at her sides.

Not distressed. Not resistant. Not thinking about anything else. She is entirely present, entirely willing, and there is nothing happening in her at all.

This has been the case for about seven weeks.

And here is the thing she is doing while the room sings, which she has been doing for six of those seven weeks and which is the actual problem: she is deciding what it means.

It means she has drifted. It means something has gone cold. It means there is unconfessed something. It means that the last time she felt anything real was a while ago now and that it has been quietly slipping since then and that she has been the last to notice, and that everybody around her has an access she used to have and has lost.

The singing goes up a key. She stands there.

That is you, and your room might be a service, a prayer, a Bible you read at the table every morning, a moment somebody described to you that has never once happened to you.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to stand there and absorb it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Not the woman two rows in front. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

The verse does not say the feeling is right

There is a short line in a psalm about music and singing, sitting in the middle of a chapter that is entirely about praise, and it says something very specific about where truth lives.

For the word of the LORD is right; and all his works are done in truth.Psalm 33:4

The word of the LORD is right.

Right, meaning straight, accurate, correct. And notice what the psalm does not say, in a chapter full of instruments and new songs and loud noise: it does not locate the rightness in the singing, or in the response, or in what anybody in the room is experiencing.

That is a chapter about worship declining to make the worshipper the measure of anything.

And that is exactly what a woman with her hands at her sides needs, because the arithmetic she is doing rests entirely on an assumption nobody ever taught her out loud and everybody taught her by implication: that what she feels in a room is a readout of where she stands with God.

It is not. It has never been. There is no verse anywhere that makes it one.

You are standing on something whose rightness has nothing to do with your reading this morning. That is not a comfort in a warm room: Psalm 33:4 puts the rightness in the word and the truth in His works and never once in the response, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a right thing hold under a woman who has felt nothing for seven weeks rather than the amount of feeling anybody can generate in a good service.

Nobody is calling your seven weeks a lie

Now the part that has to be said carefully, because this is exactly where people get hurt in rooms like that one.

Nothing here is telling you that you should be feeling something and are not because of a fault. Nothing here is going to tell you the numbness is disobedience, or drift, or a sign, or a symptom. That would be a diagnosis, and it is not mine to make, and it would put the entire weight back on a woman who is already carrying it.

And nothing here is telling you that what you feel does not matter or is not real. Seven weeks of flat is real and it is worth taking to somebody. It may be about sleep, or about a season, or about a hard year, or about your body, and any of those would be an ordinary human thing rather than a spiritual verdict.

What is being said is one thing only: the flatness is not a readout. It is not connected to the instrument you thought it was connected to. It is measuring something, but it is not measuring where you stand with God, because that was never located in you.

You have been reading a gauge that was never wired to what you thought it was wired to. The written word puts the rightness in itself and the truth in His works, and the Spirit of God is the one holding a person in place through seven flat weeks, never the readings anybody takes off themselves in a full room.

There is no key here and no method. Nothing on this page is a technique for feeling more, because a technique can be performed badly and the failing of it would land on you.