Dread At The Party

The cake has come out and everybody is singing, and you are singing too.

Fifty candles, which is more fire than a supermarket sponge cake was built for, and somebody has turned the big light off for the effect, and there is a phone up filming, and the singing is that ragged half beat behind itself the way it always is when nobody starts it properly.

You are near the back, by the folding table with the drinks on it. Two liter bottles going warm, a stack of red cups, a bowl of chips that somebody's toddler has been in up to the elbow. You have a cup of lemonade you have not drunk and a paper plate you are holding for no reason at all.

And in the middle of the second line of the song, it arrives.

Not a thought. Nothing you could quote back. It comes up the backs of your legs and lands somewhere under your ribs and sits there, cold and heavy and completely silent, and you are still singing. Your mouth is still making the words. Your face is doing the thing your face does.

Because here is the actual problem with the party, and it is not the dread. It is that people can see you.

At home you can go quiet. You can sit on the edge of the bed for ten minutes with your shoes on and nobody files a report. Here you have been running your face for forty minutes and you are getting tired, and the singing is going to end in about nine seconds, and when it ends somebody is going to turn around and say something to you and you are going to have to be a person about it.

So you start doing the sums. If you help stack the chairs, that buys you a job to do. If you leave before the speeches, someone will notice. If you leave after the speeches, that is another fifty minutes. You could go and stand in the hallway by the coats and look at your phone, except that is what you did at the last one.

And nothing is wrong.

That is the part that undoes you. Nobody has hurt you. Nobody has said a word out of place. It is a good party, thrown by people who love you, and there is not one single thing in this room you could point at and say, there, that is what is doing it.

Now stop for a second, because I am about to tell you two things and I want them said before anything else at all.

The first is that I am not going to ask you what caused it. Not now, not in a minute, not gently later. Free floating dread does not have an object, and every time somebody hands you a worksheet and asks you to find one you come away having failed an exercise on top of everything else. There is no cause to produce. You are not withholding one.

The second is that this is not a failure of faith. Standing by a drinks table with cold hands at your cousin's fiftieth does not mean your faith is thin or your walk is fake. A frightened body is not a faithless body. It never has been, and nobody in heaven thinks less of you for a bad hour at a good party.

Nobody at that feast was asked to explain why they were crying

Let me take you to a party that went the same way.

It is a national feast day and the whole population is standing in the square by the water gate, and they have been standing there since first light listening to a man read out of a book on a wooden platform. Thousands of them. Families, children old enough to understand, everybody outdoors, everybody in one place. This is the good day. This is the day they came home for.

And they start crying. All of them. Publicly, in the middle of the square, on the feast day, with everybody able to see everybody else's face.

And here is what they were told.

Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength.Nehemiah 8:10

Now read what is not in that verse.

Nobody asks them why. Not one person in that whole chapter turns to a weeping man in the crowd and says, what is the matter with you, this is supposed to be a celebration. The question is never put. The cause is never demanded. Whatever was going on under those ribs stayed under those ribs and the day went on being holy over the top of it.

Beloved, you are not being asked to explain yourself tonight either. That question is not coming from the word and it is not coming from the Holy Spirit, and if it has been running in your own head all evening, understand where it came from, because it did not come from Him.

Then look at what they were actually told to do, because it is startlingly ordinary. Eat something rich. Drink something sweet. Make up a plate for somebody who has not got one and send it down the table to them. That is the whole instruction. Nothing about their faces. Nothing about their feelings. Nothing about producing an emotion on a deadline.

And then the line everybody quotes, with the one word in it that everybody skips.

The joy of the LORD is your strength.

Of the Lord. His joy. Not yours, not the joy you were supposed to have arrived with, not the gladness you have been trying to manufacture since you parked the car. The gladness holding that square together belonged to Somebody else, and they were standing inside it whether or not they could feel it in their chests.

So you are not the source of the joy in that room, and you were never appointed to be. That is written, plainly, in a verse people have embroidered onto cushions for four hundred years, and the same Spirit who moved on a crowd at the water gate is in your cousin's front room right now, and He did not come in with you.

And the word underneath our word strength is not a mood. It is a stronghold. A fortified place. Something you go inside, with walls somebody else built and gates somebody else hung, and you do not have to be feeling strong to be standing in it.

You are not asked to feel like a fortress. You are asked to be in one, and in Christ you already are: His word calls Him your refuge and His Spirit is the One who keeps you there while your hands are cold and your face is tired.