Even in Laughter, and He Is Not Fooled

Somebody has put the music up and somebody else has put it down and this will happen four more times before the evening is over, and both of them are enjoying it enormously.

The front room. Aunties, cousins, one baby being passed around like a dish. A plate in her hand that somebody made her take.

And she is the middle of it. She always is. She is the one who makes the room, who gets the quiet one talking, who says the thing that makes her uncle laugh so hard he has to hold the doorframe.

It is real. That is the first thing to say and it is important. She is not performing. The warmth is hers, the laughter is hers, none of it is fake.

And it is also, if she is honest, the most effective door she has ever built.

Because a woman who is that bright is never asked. Nobody in this room has ever said but how are you really, and they have not said it because there is no gap in the surface to say it into.

She has known this for a while. And she has assumed, without examining it, that being genuinely seen would require her to break the surface in front of people, in a room, with everybody looking. Which she will not do. So she has stayed unasked, and told herself it is fine.

Come and stand by the kitchen door with me, sister, where it is slightly cooler. Because there is a half verse in Proverbs that I want you to know exists.

Somebody wrote it down

Proverbs, and it is one of the shortest and most observant lines in the book.

Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness.Proverbs 14:13

Read it again and let it be about you.

Even in laughter. Not instead of laughter. Not laughter that was fake. Real laughter, and something else present at the same time.

That verse is in the Bible. Somebody observed exactly what you do, thousands of years ago, and thought it important enough to write down and preserve. Which means the condition you are in is not a strange private failure. It is a documented human thing and it has been known about for a very long time.

You are described in that book exactly as you are, and the laughter and the heaviness are put in one sentence without either being called false. That is not a clever use of a proverb; Proverbs 14:13 says even in laughter and refuses to make the mirth a lie, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old observation and stands it up by a kitchen door in a room full of aunties. What you do is not a deception. It is a described condition.

Now the second half, and it is the assumption you have been living by.

You assumed that being seen requires a scene. That the only route from where you are to being known runs through a moment in a room with everybody's face turning toward you.

But look at how it works in that verse. Nobody in the proverb is told. The observation is made by the writer, over people generally, and it goes into the book. Being accurately known and being publicly disclosed are two separate things, and the first one has already happened.

You have already been accurately seen underneath, and being seen has not required one moment of performance from you. Psalm 139:2 says thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that knowing specific and warm rather than clinical, which means somebody has already looked past the brightness and stayed.

Nothing is being asked of the brightness

Let me be careful here, because this is where advice usually gets clumsy.

I am not going to tell you the warmth is a mask and should come off. It is not a mask. It is one of the best things about you and it has fed and carried people in that room for years.

And I am not going to tell you to go and be vulnerable at your aunt tonight. Being handed a disclosure task at a family party is exactly the sort of thing that makes a woman never open another article like this one.

What I will say is smaller and it is true. The brightness is allowed to rest, with God, for the length of one sentence, in a kitchen doorway, without anybody in the front room knowing anything happened.

You have permission to let it rest for one sentence, and nobody in that room has to be told a thing. Matthew 6:6 says enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes secret an actual provision for people who cannot do it any other way.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does a great deal in that room already.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how much of yourself you are prepared to show. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.