I Wanted To Be The Deep One

Nine in the evening, and the lights are on over the table, and it is the exact hour when a good evening decides whether it is going to keep going.

Fifteen of them. Plates pushed back. A man standing up to tell a story with both hands, badly, to enormous effect. Kids on the grass in the half dark, doing something that has rules only they know.

And her at the middle of the table, where she always ends up, doing what she always does, which is being the reason the evening has not run out of air.

She is good at this. She would not say so, but she knows it in the way you know a thing about yourself that has been true since you were nine. Rooms are easier when she is in them. She can get four strangers talking in eleven minutes. She notices the one person who has gone quiet and she gets to them without anybody seeing her do it.

And at the other end of that table there is a woman of about fifty who has said almost nothing all evening, and who has, in the last two years, been the person that three different people at this table have gone to when their lives came apart.

Not her. Never her.

She has been wanting to be that person since she was about twenty-five. Not instead of this. As well as this. And it has never once happened, and she has begun to suspect that it never will, because there is something about being easy company that makes people bring you the good half of their life and take the other half somewhere else.

And she has never said one word of this to anybody, because a woman who is known for being cheerful cannot raise it without the raising itself sounding like a bid.

What is not coming

Let me get this out of the way so you can hear the rest properly.

This page is not going to tell you what you have instead. There is no compensating word at the bottom, no list, no paragraph revealing your real thing and expecting you to be pleased. That would be a page telling you what you are, and this site does not do that.

And it is not going to tell you that being cheerful is secretly the deeper gift. That is the trick where somebody hands you a compliment in place of an answer, and you would spot it inside a sentence.

And it is not going to promise you that people will start coming. Nobody knows that.

You are not being consoled here, and there is no trade being arranged. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one verse in Galatians, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman reconciled to a substitute before He would speak to her.

Paul removes the other person from the sentence

Here is the verse, and it is doing something structurally strange that most people read past.

But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.Galatians 6:4

Rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.

He is not saying be pleased with yourself. He is describing a measurement that has no second party in it.

Which is almost impossible to imagine from the middle of a table. Every assessment you have ever run on yourself has had somebody else in the frame. That is how you know you are the cheerful one: because of who else is in the room and what they are.

Paul is saying that the real assessment does not contain the woman at the other end of the table. She is not in it. Not above you and not below you. She is simply not a term in the equation.

You are being assessed in a sentence that has nobody else in it, and the woman at the other end of that table has never once been part of the measurement. I am not stretching that. Galatians 6:4 explicitly removes the comparison and says so in plain words, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman at a long table at nine in the evening.

Prove his own work is not a performance review

And notice what he asks for instead, because it is gentler than it sounds.

Prove his own work. That is an old word for test or examine. Look at the thing you actually did rather than at how it compares.

You got four strangers talking in eleven minutes tonight. That is a real event that happened in the world. It is not made larger by the woman at the other end saying nothing, and it is not made smaller by it, and it did not become anything different when you noticed her.

The comparison adds nothing to the evidence. It only adds the ache.

You have done real work tonight that is exactly what it is with nobody standing next to it, and the word tells you to look at the thing itself rather than at the gap. That is Galatians 6:4 in its own instruction, and the Spirit who searches all things has been at that table all evening and has not been running the comparison you have been running.

Handing it over, precisely

So here is the action, and I want to be exact, because the sloppy version is cruel.

Handing it over is not deciding you never wanted it.

It is not deciding it will never happen.

It is not deciding that cheerfulness is your gift and being satisfied. Nobody here is telling you what your gift is.

It is saying the thing out loud, once, in your own voice, and putting it into His hands instead of carrying it round every table for another thirteen years.

You are able to put it down without pretending you never wanted it, and Scripture never once requires a person to stop longing as the price of handing something over. The word removes the other person from the sentence without removing the wanting, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not waiting for you to feel settled first.