Not Sad, Just Empty

The rain came down the windscreen in one sheet and then another, and she sat in the car with the engine off and the wipers off and watched it.

She was not upset. That is the thing she cannot get anybody to understand. Nothing had happened. The car park was full, the shop was open, there was a list on her phone and eleven pounds of food on it, and she sat there for twenty minutes because starting the next thing required something she could not find in the house.

Not sad. She has said it out loud to two people now, and both of them said oh no, what is wrong, and both times she had to say nothing, that is the whole problem. There is nothing to point at. Nobody died. The job is fine. The children are fine. There is no story underneath this that would make it make sense to anybody, including her.

Just flat. Flat for months. Food tastes like the idea of food. Music she used to love goes past like traffic. She does everything she is supposed to do and she does it well, and somewhere between getting up and lying down there is a woman doing all of it who cannot feel any of it.

And the cruellest part is the advice, which is always the same, and always arrives as a job. Get out more. Try gratitude. Have you thought about a course. Pray about it. Every single one of them lands on the one part of her that has nothing left in it.

So let me say something different, sitting here in the passenger seat with the rain coming down.

I am not going to give you anything to do.

God did not tell him to try harder

There is a man in the Bible who lies down in the desert and asks to die.

He is not a backslider. He has just come off the biggest day of his working life, the day everyone still talks about, fire and rain and a whole nation shouting the right thing at last. And then he walks a day into the wilderness, sits under a broom tree, and says, it is enough now, take my life. He is not sad about a loss. He has no story to give you either. He is empty in the way a jug is empty.

Now watch God, because what He does here is the most tender thing in the book, and He does it twice.

He lets him sleep.

Then He sends somebody who touches him on the shoulder and says, get up and eat. And there is bread baked on hot stones by his head and a jar of water beside it. He eats. He drinks. He lies down again. And the messenger comes back a second time, touches him again, and says the sentence I want you to hear tonight more than anything else in this message.

Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.1 Kings 19:7

Read that again with your own week in it.

The journey is too great for you. God says it. Not as an accusation. As an observation, from somebody standing right there, who can see exactly how much is in the jug and is not shocked by the number.

He does not say, you should be able to manage this. He does not say, look at what you did on the mountain, do that again. He does not ask him a single question about his prayer life. There is no sermon under that tree at all. There is sleep, and there is bread, and there is a hand on the shoulder, and there is God saying out loud that the road is bigger than the man.

And then, only then, forty days of strength out of one meal.

So hear the order of it, because the world has the order backwards and it has been beating you with it. Strength did not come first and get rewarded with rest. Rest came first. Food came first. Being touched by somebody who was not asking for anything came first. The strength came out of the meal, not out of the effort.

If you are flat tonight, you are not being disciplined by God. You are not behind on anything. There is not a version of you that God prefers who is currently unavailable. He is not tapping His foot at the far end of this season waiting for the old you to come back on shift.

He came to a man with no story and no feelings left, and He brought him food.

And say this plainly with me, because flatness can go somewhere darker: if the emptiness has started sounding like everyone would be better off without me, that is not a thought to sit alone with tonight. Tell a doctor, and tell one person who loves you. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Wherever you are, there is a local line and there are people awake. Go and be with a human being. Nothing on this page is instead of that, and you are worth the phone call.