The Tissues She Did Not Open

The bride's grandmother put a little packet of tissues at every single place setting, cellophane and all, because she has been to weddings before and she knows what the speeches do to a room.

It is that hour of the reception when the light has gone gold and gone low and somebody has taken their shoes off under the table. There is cake on plates nobody is eating. There is a child asleep across two chairs by the wall with a jacket over her. The band is between sets. And the father of the bride is on his feet with a piece of paper he is not going to need, saying the thing about the swimming lessons, and he gets four words into it before his voice goes.

The whole table goes with him. The woman on her left is laughing and crying at once and has already torn her packet open. The man across from her has taken his glasses off. Somebody down the row says oh, honey, out loud, to nobody.

And she sits there with her packet still folded in the cellophane, turning it over in her fingers, feeling exactly nothing move.

Not numb, is the strange part. She loves these people. She is glad, genuinely glad, in the way you are glad when somebody you love has finally got something good. She can feel the gladness perfectly well. It just does not reach the place where the crying is kept, and she puts the packet down on the tablecloth and does a small piece of arithmetic she has never done before.

She has not cried since the year this started. Not once. Not at the appointment, not in the parking lot afterward, not on the night she sat on the bathroom floor with the door locked, not at a funeral in the spring that undid everybody else in the building. She would have told you she was coping. She was coping. She is, in fact, extremely good at this. On Sunday she will stand in front of forty people and carry them through something real and mean every word of it, and nobody, not one person, would guess.

Something got sealed, is what she thinks, holding the tissues. And I do not know when, and I do not know how to open it, and I am not sure anybody would believe me if I said it out loud.

That is you, perhaps, at your own table, in your own good clothes, glad for somebody and quietly aware that the gladness is running on the surface. Everything works. Everything is fine. And a door somewhere in you has been shut so long that you have stopped noticing it is a door.

The thing that got sealed

The usual thing first, and plainly. The people caring for your body are a gift and nothing here competes with them. Keep the appointments. Take what you have been given to take. And if the sealed part of you is something a person trained for this could help with, that is not a spiritual failure either. God is not in competition with anybody who is trying to help you.

Now the door.

A body under a long strain does something sensible and quiet. It turns the volume down. Not on everything, because you can still laugh at the toast and mean it. It turns the volume down on the channel where the big things come through, because the big things were arriving daily for a while there and something in you decided, without asking you, that this house cannot take another delivery that size.

That is not weakness and it is not hardness of heart and it is certainly not a sin you have failed to remember. It is a room that got closed off in a house where the heating had to go somewhere else.

The trouble is that the door does not open on schedule when the strain lets up. It stays shut. And meanwhile you keep working, keep leading, keep showing up, and every time you do it well the evidence stacks a little higher that nothing is wrong, until you are holding a packet of tissues at a wedding wondering what happened to you.

David wrote a psalm about a shepherd, and in the middle of the green pastures and the still waters there is a line most people read straight past:

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.Psalm 23:3

He restoreth my soul. That is on the work list. Not the body only. The soul, the inside of a person, the part that got worn thin. You are on His list for the part of you nobody can see, and you were on it before you knew there was anything shut. That is not my encouragement to you. Psalm 23:3 names the restoring of a soul as something the Shepherd Himself does, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that work in a person rather than a person managing to feel something at the right moment.

Alongside, and never instead

Now I have to be careful, because this category is where a lie usually gets told, and it gets told with a warm voice.

The lie goes like this: your body was not healed, so let us call the inner thing your healing instead, and then everyone can go home. I am not going to do that to you. That is a consolation prize dressed as revelation, and it quietly redefines the word so that you can be told you got what you asked for when you did not.

So, both halves of what this site says, in one breath, and neither of them softened.

God heals. He heals bodies. It is written, it is His character, and I am not going to whisper it just because I cannot control it.

And I do not promise you the result. Not for your body, not for the door, not the timing of either one. We say what He has said and we leave the current to Him.

Which means the restoring of your soul is additional. It runs alongside your body and never in place of it. If your body is not well, it is still not well, and nothing that happens in you this week converts that into a settled account. You have a Shepherd who works on both, and neither one of them is a substitute He is offering you instead of the other. Psalm 23:3 puts soul restoration inside a psalm that also has a table and a rod and a house to live in, and it is His Spirit who does that restoring, not the amount of feeling you can produce at a wedding.

And hear this next part in the plainest voice I have. Nobody sealed that door as a punishment, and nothing about it is a shortage of enough faith. A person who has been standing in a long strain does not owe anyone an explanation for the way their heart rationed itself.

One more thing, and I would rather say it and not need it. If the sealed feeling has slid into something darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking there would be less to manage if you were not here, tell one living human being today rather than tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can be with you tonight. A page cannot sit on a floor with anybody. You deserve someone who can.