Two Days Without Saying Anything Out Loud

She found out on Wednesday afternoon because the delivery driver needed her to confirm something and she opened the door and said yes, that's me, and her own voice came out wrong.

Not croaky. Not exactly. Strange. Like a recording of herself. Like a thing she was operating rather than a thing she was.

She shut the door and stood in the hall and did the arithmetic and it came out at about fifty hours.

Monday afternoon, on a call, and it was a call so it was through a headset and it was about a spreadsheet. Since then: two work days, an evening, a night, another evening, another night, and a Wednesday morning, and she has typed a very great deal and read a very great deal and laughed at least four times at things on a screen, and she has not said one word out loud to a living person.

She lives alone. She works from home. This is not a crisis and she wants that established immediately.

She likes her job. She is good at it. She chose this arrangement and would choose it again, and there are eleven people who would come round if she asked, and her sister called on Sunday and they talked for forty minutes and it was warm and real and neither of them was performing.

So this is not a story about somebody who is isolated. She is thirty-eight and connected and busy and doing fine.

And she is standing in her own hall on a Wednesday afternoon having heard her voice come out of her like something borrowed, and there is a hunger in her that has been there a while, and the thing that has kept her from saying a word about it to anybody is not shame. It is that it does not seem to qualify.

Other people have real problems. Other people are grieving or ill or in trouble. What is she going to say, that she works from home and it is fine and there is something missing that she cannot name and it is not loneliness.

And you know that hall. There is a hunger in you that is not about wanting company, and it has never seemed serious enough to occupy anybody's time, and so it has been sitting there for a long while unmentioned.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not making something out of nothing and this counts. Psalm 38:9 says Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee, and groaning there is deliberately not a word for anything articulate, and the Holy Spirit is in this hall with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The promise is filling, not improvement

There is a line in the Beatitudes that everybody has heard and almost nobody looks at the second half of.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.Matthew 5:6

Look at what is promised. Not that they shall be improved. Not that they shall be corrected, taught, or brought into line. Filled.

The word behind it is a physical word. It is what you say about an animal that has eaten as much as it wants, and it is not a delicate term; the Greek is the word you would use about being properly fed rather than lightly refreshed. He is not offering people a spiritual adjustment. He is offering them a full stomach.

And look at who the promise is attached to. Not people who have got it right. Not people who have arrived. People who hunger and thirst, which is to say people who are currently, at this moment, without.

That is the qualification. The lack is the qualification.

You are qualified by the very thing you have been discounting. The written word attaches the promise to hungering rather than to having, and promises filling rather than correction, which means the ache you have been treating as too small to mention is the entry condition; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a hall on a Wednesday afternoon.

And notice where this sits. It is in a list of blessings He opens His whole teaching with, spoken to a crowd on a hillside, before He has asked anybody for anything. The list is not a set of requirements. It is Him going through a crowd naming the people everybody else would have discounted and saying they are the fortunate ones.

The bar you set for yourself

I want to name the thing that has actually kept you silent, because it is not what you would have said if asked.

It is not shame and it is not privacy. It is a bar. Somewhere you decided that a difficulty has to reach a certain severity before it is allowed to occupy anybody's attention, including God's, and yours has never reached it.

And the bar is not absurd. There genuinely are people grieving and ill and in trouble, and you genuinely are fine, and a person with any decency does hesitate before taking up space.

But look at what the bar actually does. It sorts. And nothing in that hillside list sorts. He does not say blessed are they whose hunger is of a sufficient grade. He says blessed are they that hunger, and the crowd He said it to would have contained every possible severity of everything, and He did not grade one of them.

You were never being sorted, and the bar you set was never installed by anybody with authority. Isaiah 55:1 says ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and the every one in that sentence is doing a lot of work; His Spirit is the one who carries it, and He is not comparing your situation to anybody else's.

And here is the second half, and I am going to keep it plain. I am not going to tell you what this hunger is about, or trace it to your work arrangement, or suggest that it means you have made your life wrong. A stranger writing at a distance who starts adjusting a woman's circumstances on the basis of a paragraph is doing something reckless.

What is true is that it is real, and it does not need to be classified before it can be met, and the promise in that verse is filling and not a rearrangement of your week.

You are not being asked to change anything to qualify, and nothing about your arrangement is under review here. Psalm 34:10 says they that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing, and want there is the old word for lack; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has been in this house for all fifty hours.

Out loud is the point

Here is something practical, and it has been sitting in this article since the first line.

Your voice came out strange because you had not used it in two days, and that is a purely physical fact and not a metaphor.

But it does mean something for what comes next. Because whatever you do about this, doing it in your head will not work, and it will not work for a reason that has nothing to do with faith. You have been in your own head for fifty hours. Your head is where the bar got built and where the arithmetic gets done and where everything has been going in circles.

Out loud is a different room. A thing said out loud is an event that happened in the world at a particular time, and a thing thought is more of the same weather.

So say it out loud, in the kitchen, at a normal volume, badly, in a voice that sounds strange to you. The strangeness is not a problem. It is just what a voice does after two days.

You have a voice and it works, and out loud is available to you right now. Scripture says blessed are they which do hunger and thirst, for they shall be filled, and the filling is promised to the hungry rather than to the articulate; the Holy Spirit is the one who arranged for a delivery driver to need something confirmed on a Wednesday afternoon.

So the hall is not a place where something is wrong with you. It is a house with nobody in it and a woman in it who is fine and busy and connected, and a hunger that qualifies exactly as it is, and a voice that will sound less strange the second time.

And one plain thing before we go on. If the ache has gone further than an ache, find a real person this week and let them be with you in it. If it has turned into not wanting to be here, tell somebody today; in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a real person will answer.