The Staff Room at Lunch

Twenty-two minutes, which is what is left of a forty-minute lunch once you have got a class out of a room and got yourself down two flights and made something hot.

The staff room is the same staff room it has always been. The long table with the surface that will not come clean. Somebody's mug that everybody knows not to use. A noticeboard with three things on it that are out of date and one that matters. The kettle that is loud enough that people stop talking while it boils and then start again.

Eleven people in here today. She has worked beside four of them for nine years.

And she is standing by the window with her lunch, in a conversation about parking, which is genuinely the subject and has been for about four minutes.

And what has been sitting in her for a few weeks, and has finally come into focus in the last twenty-two minutes, is this: she has a policy about this room, and she cannot remember making it.

The policy is that nothing real is said in here.

Not by her. Other people say real things in here all the time. A man cried in this room in February about something at home and everybody was decent about it and it was fine. A woman announced her divorce over by the kettle two years ago in about nine words.

So it is not the room. The room can take it. The room has taken it repeatedly.

It is her, and it is a policy rather than a temperament, and the difference matters. She is not a private person by nature. She is quite warm. She is one of the ones who remembers birthdays. If you polled that staff room about who is easy to work with she would be near the top and it would be sincere.

But in nine years, in that room, she has not once said anything that would tell any of them what her life is actually like, and she made that policy at some point without a meeting, and it has been running ever since, and it is now indistinguishable from her personality.

And you know that room. You would rather be looked at than known, and it did not arrive as a decision, it arrived as a reflex that hardened, and by now nobody would ever think to ask, including you.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not cold and nine years of that room did not make you into somebody else. Psalm 139:1 says O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me, and both verbs are finished and thorough, and the Holy Spirit is in this staff room with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

Two words for the least accessible part

There is a line in Jeremiah where God describes His own ordinary practice, and the two words He uses are worth slowing down on.

I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.Jeremiah 17:10

Search the heart, and try the reins.

Heart, in that language, is not feelings. It is the whole inner life: the thinking, the deciding, the place where a person is actually located. And reins is an old word for the kidneys, which sounds strange to us and which in Hebrew stands for the deepest interior of a person, the part furthest from any surface, the thing nobody has access to including the person themselves.

So He names the most interior and least reachable part of a human being and says: I search that.

And He says it as a description of routine. Not as a threat and not as an event scheduled for later. This is what I do. It is present tense and it is ordinary, in the middle of a passage about how hard it is for anybody to know their own heart.

Which is a peculiar comfort for a woman standing by a window talking about parking. There is a part of you that has not been reached in that room in nine years, and there is a part of you that has not been reached by anybody, and He names it specifically and says He goes there as a matter of course.

You are searched in the part that nobody else has ever had access to. The written word names the deepest and least reachable interior and puts the searching of it in the ordinary present tense, which means the place your policy has been protecting has been open on one side the entire time; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a staff room at ten to one.

And notice the verse before it, because it is the reason this one is a mercy. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? It is a question, and it is asked in despair, and verse ten is the answer to it.

A reflex is not a decision, and it is not a personality either

I want to be precise, because you have half seen this and the exact shape of it is what will let you do anything about it.

You called it a policy, and that is nearly right and is slightly too flattering to it. A policy is decided. What you have is a reflex that got repeated until it became a fact.

It probably started with something small and sensible. A moment in year one when saying something would have been unwise, or a colleague who was not safe, or simply the ordinary caution of a new person in an established room. Any of those would be good judgment.

And then nothing ever contradicted it, because a reflex like that generates its own evidence: you say nothing, so nobody asks, so there is never an opening, so you say nothing. Nine years of that produces something that looks exactly like a personality trait, and everybody in that room including you now files it under who she is.

You did not decide this, and a reflex that generates its own evidence looks identical to a temperament. Jeremiah 17:9 asks who can know the heart, and asks it as an honest question about the limits of self-knowledge; His Spirit is the one who does that knowing, and He is not marking your nine years.

And here is the second half, and I want to be careful with it, because this is nearly the last thing this whole site says.

Nothing on this page will tell you what to say, or to whom, or that it should be one of the four you have worked beside for nine years, or that it should be anybody at that school at all. You know that room and those eleven people and no page does, and both the thing and the person stay yours to choose.

You are choosing both the what and the whom, and no page and no staff room gets a vote. Ecclesiastes 4:9 says two are better than one, and it names a number rather than a colleague; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has been in that staff room for nine years of lunches.

Somebody has already gone first in that room

Here is the thing I want you to notice, because you already told it to me and did not hear yourself.

A man cried in that room in February and everybody was decent. A woman announced her divorce by the kettle in nine words and it was fine.

That room has been tested twice in recent memory and passed both times.

Which removes the thing you have never quite examined, which is a background assumption that saying something real in a staff room is dangerous. In that particular room, on the available evidence, it is not. Other people have done it and the room held and nothing bad happened to either of them and both are still there.

So whatever is stopping you, it is not a risk assessment about the room, because the assessment has been done twice by other people and came back fine.

You have evidence that the room holds, and it was gathered by somebody else at no cost to you. Scripture says I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, and He states it as what He does rather than as what anybody has earned; the Holy Spirit is the one who put a man in tears and a woman at a kettle into your memory to be recalled at exactly this moment.

So the staff room is not a hostile room. It is a long table and a loud kettle and eleven decent people, four of whom you have worked beside for nine years, and a reflex that hardened in year one and has been running unexamined ever since.

And one plain thing. If what you have been holding is heavier than a page can hold, find a real person this week, before and apart from any of the rest of this. If it has gone further than tired, tell somebody today; in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a real person will answer.