Glad in a Room That Is Not

She does the thing with her face in the corridor, about four steps before the door.

It is small. Nobody has ever seen it. The mouth comes down a little at the corners and the eyebrows come in, and what she is doing, though she has never once named it, is setting her face to the level of the room she is about to walk into. Then she pushes the door open with her hip because there is a mug in each hand, and the break room is already going.

It is twenty to nine. The coffee pot is doing its last gasp. There are five of them by the counter and the subject is the same subject it is every morning, which is that everything is terrible and getting worse and nobody is surprised. It is not cruelty. That is the thing people get wrong about a room like this. They are not unkind people. Two of them will drop everything if your car will not start. It is a house style, a way of being together, a running agreement that the safe place to stand is slightly to the left of hoping for anything, where you cannot be caught out.

Joan pours her coffee. Somebody asks how her weekend was, and here is where she does the second thing, the one she likes even less than the face.

Because her weekend was good. It was really good. Her daughter came home and they took the long way round the reservoir on Saturday and the light on the water was ridiculous, and on Sunday morning she sang until her chest ached and got home and made too much food and ate it in the garden with the radio on. There is gladness sitting in her right now, at twenty to nine, under her breastbone, like warm bread.

And what she says is: yeah, not bad. Quiet. You know.

Then she puts a joke on the end of it, a small self-deprecating one, because a joke on the end takes the temperature down and everybody relaxes, and the conversation moves on to the parking situation. Joan drinks her coffee and it is fine and she is fine and nobody has been hurt, and something in her goes very quietly back into its box for another eight hours.

She has three moves and she knows all three by heart. Perform it, which is exhausting and makes people wary. Defend it, which turns a Monday morning into a debate she never wanted. Or dim it, which is the cheapest and quietest, and which is the one she picks, every single time, and which costs her something she cannot name and cannot get back at five o'clock.

You know the corridor and you know the four steps. Maybe it is not an office. It might be a kitchen table, a family group chat, a Sunday afternoon at somebody's house where the weather forecast is a personal insult. And you are not looking for a way to change those people, because you love them and it is not your job and you have never once thought it was. You are looking for the fourth move. There is one. It is in a verse that everybody has on a coffee cup and almost nobody has read in context.

Whose joy the verse actually says it is

Here is the scene it comes out of, because the scene is half of it.

The wall is finished. The exiles are home. And they gather in the square and a man reads the Law out loud from morning until midday, and the whole crowd stands there and weeps, because they are hearing what they were made for and how far off it they have been. It is a genuinely heavy morning. And into that, the leaders say something that sounds almost tactless until you look at it properly.

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

Read the middle of the last clause. The joy of the LORD. Not your joy. Not the joy you generate on a good weekend and have to keep topped up. His. It is His gladness, and it is being described as a thing that arrives at people and holds them up, in a square full of people who are crying.

That changes what happens in a break room, because it takes the whole thing out of your hands. You are not the manufacturer of what rises in you, and you were never appointed to protect the supply. That is not my flattering read on your temperament. Nehemiah 8 says whose joy it is in the plainest words available, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a supply like that running into a room at twenty to nine whether or not the room has asked for any.

And notice that nobody in that square is told to explain themselves. The instruction is not go and persuade the weeping ones. It is go your way, eat, drink, send some round to whoever has nothing prepared. Ordinary. Unannounced. You have never been made responsible for anybody else's morning, and it is written into that verse that the portions go round without a speech attached, and the Spirit who inspired it is not asking you to convert a coffee break.

Strength is not decoration

Now the word that gets skipped. Strength.

Not garnish. Not mood. Not the nice extra on top of a person who is basically coping. Strength is the load bearing word in that sentence, and it means the thing you have been turning down for eight hours a day is the thing that was holding your day up. That is why five o'clock costs what it costs. You have not been managing your volume. You have been rationing your own scaffolding.

And here is what makes it safe to stop rationing it. Jesus said He was saying things so that His joy would remain in you and your joy would be full (John 15:11), and remain is a residency word, not a visit. Psalm 16 puts fullness of joy in His presence rather than in an atmosphere. You are drawing on something that has never once been sourced from the mood of the people around you. That is God's own arrangement, written in Psalm 16 and said out loud by Jesus in John 15, and the same Spirit who inspired both is the one keeping the tenancy while you stand at a coffee pot.

Which retires all three of your moves at once. You do not have to perform it, because a supply does not need advertising. You do not have to defend it, because you are not its author and nobody in that room is actually asking you to prove anything. And you do not have to dim it to keep the peace, because the peace in that room was never resting on how low you kept your face. It is already settled, and it was settled without a vote in the break room. Isaiah 61 calls it a garment of praise given in place of a spirit of heaviness, and a garment is put on you rather than performed by you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the dressing.

One plain thing before we go on, folded in because I would far rather say it and be unnecessary. If the box you put things into at twenty to nine has stopped opening in the evenings, if the whole thing has gone somewhere heavy and stayed there, tell one human being today, and if you are in any danger reach the crisis line where you live and stay with a real voice. There is nothing about asking that turns a glad woman into a fraud.