Glad on the Outside of a Party

There is bunting. Somebody's mom made the bunting out of an old duvet cover and it is genuinely lovely and everyone has said so.

Back garden, late August, that hour where the light goes the color of the inside of a peach and everybody's arms look good. A trestle table with a cloth on it. A cake with the two of them piped on it in a way that is meant to be funny and is.

Her best friend since they were eleven is standing in the middle of all of it with a ring on and her face is doing something her face has never done before.

And she is happy. She would swear to that. She has hugged her, she has cried a bit at the right moment, she has told the story about the disastrous first date to four separate groups of people and got the laugh every time.

She has felt nothing since she arrived.

Not jealousy. She has checked. She has gone looking for jealousy the way you check a tooth with your tongue, because jealousy would at least be something, and it is not there. There is just a very good performance of a delighted friend, running smoothly, with nobody home.

She is standing by the table now with a paper cup, and the thought has finally surfaced: this is the happiest day of my best friend's life and I am not at it.

Hey. Come round the side of the house with me where it is quieter. Because there is one sentence of Jesus about the kind of life He came to hand over, and I do not think it means what you have been assuming.

Abundant is not a word about volume

Here is the sentence, and it is one of the most quoted things He ever said.

I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.John 10:10

Now. Everybody hears abundantly and pictures intensity. More feeling. Bigger emotions. A life turned up.

But look at where He says it. He is in the middle of talking about a shepherd and a fold and a thief who comes to steal and kill and destroy. The contrast He draws is not between a quiet life and a loud one. It is between a life that is being taken from and a life that is being kept.

Abundant there is closer to full, in the sense that a well is full: it has depth in it, and it holds, and it does not run out. It is a description of what kind of life it is, not how much you are currently experiencing of it.

You are already inside the life He came to give, and the fulness in that verse was never a measurement of how much you can feel at a party. That is not a way of letting you off the hook; John 10:10 sets abundant life against a thief who takes, not against a quiet evening, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a shepherd's speech and stands it up in a back garden with bunting made out of a duvet cover. Your feeling gauge is not the level in the well.

Now the second thing, and it is the one I actually came round the side of the house to say.

You went looking for jealousy. That is worth noticing, because of what it tells you about yourself. You suspected the numbness of being a moral failure in disguise, and you went looking for the sin under it, and you did not find one, and you have not stopped suspecting.

That is a hard way to live, and it is not how God handles a person who has gone quiet. In the entire book, when somebody's inside goes flat, He feeds them, He touches them, He asks them a question, He sits with them on a road. He does not audit them for a hidden motive.

You are not hiding something you need to be caught out in, and He has not been searching your inside for a fault. Psalm 139:23 has the psalmist asking Him to search and try him, and the striking thing is who has to invite it; God is not in the habit of rifling through anybody, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a settled safety in a person rather than a nervous suspicion.

What is actually happening at that table

Let me say something careful about numbness, and then leave it alone, because I cannot diagnose you and I will not try.

Feeling is a system and systems get tired. Something in a person can go quiet after a long stretch of carrying, or after something that should never have happened, or for reasons that are entirely of the body and nothing at all to do with the soul. That last one is real and it is common and it is not a spiritual verdict.

What I can tell you is what is not true. It is not true that God is only reachable through your emotions. If that were the arrangement, then every person on a hard medication and every person in a flat season would be shut out, and the book does not read that way.

You have access that runs completely independently of your mood, and it was opened by Somebody else's work rather than your own weather. Hebrews 10:19 says we have boldness to enter by the blood of Jesus, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that entrance a live thing for a young woman holding a paper cup with nothing rising in her chest. The door does not check how you are feeling on the way through.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it is more use to you tonight than your feelings are.

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 anybody plants. Not the strength of what you can produce at a party. 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.