Where The Gladness Went Quiet

Opal has not missed a Wednesday in eleven years, and she could not tell you the last time she enjoyed one.

That is the part she has never said out loud, and she has thought hard about whether to say it here. Nothing has failed. She reads her Bible in the morning with coffee, same chair. She prays for nineteen people by name, and she knows which ones are having a hard week. She takes food where food is needed. She gives what she has always given. If you looked at the outside of her life you would not find one thing out of place, and you would probably want to be her when you got old.

But somewhere in the last four or five years, the sound went off it.

That is the only way she has been able to put it to herself. Like a radio still playing in the next room with somebody's hand on the dial, everything still there, the words still right, and no music coming through. She goes because she goes. She loves God. She is not in rebellion and she is not backslidden and she has been over that ground so many times she has worn a path in it.

She has not told a soul, because when she rehearses saying it, it comes out sounding ungrateful, and she was raised better than that.

Sunday evening the light came long and low across the yard, the way it does in September when the whole hollow turns gold for about twenty minutes. The Hensley boy from down the road came up with his fiddle under his arm to sit a while, the way young people do with Opal, and he sat on the step below her rocker and played through a couple of things, and then he started an old tune she had not heard in fifty years.

Her mother used to sing that one over a pan of beans on the back steps.

And Opal's foot started going on the boards.

Before she decided anything. Before she thought about it. She looked down at her own foot the way you would look at somebody else's, and it was keeping time, and her hand had gone to the arm of the rocker and was patting it, and something was coming up in her chest that she had not felt in years and could not have manufactured on a bet.

The boy grinned and played it again.

And you know why she almost cried on that porch. It was not the tune. It was finding out that the gladness had not gone anywhere. It had been under the floor the whole time, and something had gone through the boards and found it.

Nothing has failed, and that is what is confusing

First, the thing nobody says to a woman in this spot, so hear it plainly: a person who obeys flat is obeying.

Not obeying halfway. Not obeying while under suspicion. Obeying. Eleven years of Wednesdays with no music in them are eleven years of Wednesdays, and God is not standing over them with a thermometer. There is no verse anywhere that grades your obedience by how it felt on the way in, and any preacher who has ever implied otherwise was reading his own temperature onto you.

So the quiet is not a verdict on you. You are not on probation with God because the feeling left, and Scripture never once makes the covenant hang on the reader's mood, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been whispering that you have gone cold. Set that down first, because nothing else here works while a woman is trying to defend herself.

The gladness in this covenant is His before it is ours

Now here is where the quiet gets located, and it is not where a person naturally looks.

You have been hunting for your own gladness, checking for it the way a person checks a pilot light, and the Spirit has never once pointed anybody at their own pilot light. Read instead what God says about His own state of mind toward His people, in the first person, in a passage about the covenant He was making:

I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.Jeremiah 32:41

With all my heart and all my soul. That is God describing His own gladness in being good to people, and He put it in the terms.

Sit in that a second, because it changes the whole question. You are inside a covenant whose gladness is God's first and yours second, and Jeremiah 32:41 has Him saying so with His whole heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence like that and works it down through the boards to where your gladness has been sitting quiet.

And He put the walking inside you Himself

There is a second commitment, and it speaks straight to eleven years of showing up:

And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.Ezekiel 36:27

Read who is doing what. He puts. He causes. You have had His Spirit underneath every one of those eleven years of Wednesdays, because Ezekiel 36:27 makes the causing God's own work and not your grit, which means those Wednesdays were never a woman dragging herself somewhere out of sheer character. Something was carrying you.

That is what your foot found out on the porch. It was not manufactured. It came up.

Then the ask, and it is real

Now the term, and I am not going to soften it into a mood:

Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.Psalm 37:4

That is asked of you. Delight in Him. Turn toward Him for pleasure and not only for duty, the way you would turn toward a person you like rather than a person you owe.

Two things about it, and both matter. It is not a toll. Nobody gets into this covenant by feeling the right way about God at the door, and the quiet years did not put you outside anything. And it is not a forecast either. I am not going to stand here and tell you what God is about to hand you or when, because that is not mine to say and this site does not trade in it.

And here is the piece of it that nobody hands a woman in a quiet spell. You are already near. Ephesians 2:13 says that in Christ Jesus those who were once far off have been brought near by His blood, so the nearness was settled by somebody else's work and never by the temperature of yours, and His Spirit keeps a person there through a silent stretch exactly as through a loud one.

What Psalm 37:4 does say is where the delighting goes: into Him. And a heart that spends its time near God ends up wanting different things than it wanted, which is the quietest and best thing that can happen to a person.

So say the two halves out loud together, because they are the whole message. God's gladness in doing you good is settled, and He said so with His whole heart. Your delight is asked of you, and it is real, and it is not the thing holding the covenant up. Duty was never the enemy. It was the floor the gladness came up through.