At Ease Until the Hallway

On the job you never think about your body once.

That is the strange thing and it is worth saying out loud, because most people who write about this assume the whole day is one long ache. It is not. All morning your body is simply the thing you are doing the work with. It lifts and it carries and it climbs and it gets in and out of a truck forty times, and not once does it occur to you to have an opinion about it. There is no commentary. There is just the work and the man doing it and the two of them get along fine.

Then you come home and you walk down the hall past the mirror, and by the time you reach the other end you are somebody else.

Twelve feet. That is how long the ease lasts.

Let me put the plain thing first, because it belongs first. You have not been slack about this. Whatever else is true, nobody has worked harder in a body than you have. You have not spent your life avoiding effort and you would not know how. And you have tried to deal with the hallway too, over the years, more times than you would tell anybody, and you have gotten up and gone back to work every single time.

So I am not going to tell you to think about yourself differently. I am not going to hand you a way to feel about a mirror.

What I want to do is ask what is different about those two rooms, because the man in them is the same man, and the difference is not in him.

What the job gives you that the hall does not

Here is the difference, and once you see it you will not unsee it.

On the job your body has something to do. It is pointed at a task. Nobody is looking at it and it is not being asked to be anything, it is being asked to lift. A body with a job is a body in use, and a body in use is not on trial.

In the hallway it has no task. It is just standing there being looked at, and the only available activity is assessment. So assessment happens. It is not that you are weaker at home. It is that the hall gives you nothing to do with yourself but form an opinion.

You are not two men, and no hallway in any house has ever once turned a working man into a defendant. Psalm 131:2 says I have behaved and quieted myself as a child that is weaned of his mother, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a quiet like that possible in a room that offers nothing to do.

And notice what that means about the ease you already have. It is not a trick and it is not denial. You have proof, every working day, that a man can be at home in his own body for hours at a stretch. The capacity is not missing. It has been demonstrated since six o'clock this morning.

You have been at ease in that body all day, and the ease has never once been something you lacked. The written word is a psalm about a man deliberately quieting himself rather than waiting to feel calm, and the Spirit of God is the one who carries that quiet through a doorway with you.

A weaned child

David writes a short psalm about a very specific kind of quiet.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. (Psalm 131:2, King James Version)

A weaned child is not a child who has stopped needing his mother. He is a child who can be near her without needing anything from her in that moment. He is not making a request. He is just there, and being there is enough, and nobody is uncomfortable.

That is a picture of a man in a room with nothing to do and no demand being made in either direction.

You are able to be somewhere without being asked for anything, and no room has ever once required a man to justify standing in it. Psalm 131 is the written word where a man quiets himself deliberately, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real option in a hallway rather than a nice idea in a book.

And read the verb. I have behaved and quieted myself. He does it. It is not a feeling that arrives. It is a thing a man does, the way a man sets down a load, and then the quiet follows.

You have something to do in that hallway after all, and it has never once been an inspection. The Spirit of God is the one who hands a man an action where he had only ever been handed an opinion, and Psalm 131:2 says he quieted himself, in the past tense, as a thing already done.

The same man in both rooms

Now the part I came to say.

There is an idea running underneath all of this that needs saying out loud so you can look at it. The idea is that the man on the job is getting away with something, and the man in the hallway is seeing the truth. That the ease is a kind of forgetting and the assessment is a kind of honesty.

It is the other way around. The ease is accurate. A body that lifts and carries and climbs and gets the work done is a body doing exactly what a body is for, and that is not a distraction from the truth about you, it is the truth about you. The hallway is where a voice with no information gets an audience.

You are the same man in both rooms, and the working man has never once been the one who was mistaken. The written word says he quieted himself like a weaned child, which is a man being at peace where nothing is required, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that stick past the end of a hall.

And there is one more thing, and this is the one I would want if I were you. God has not been grading either room. Not the job, where you are competent, and not the hallway, where you are not. There is no scorecard being kept in two columns.

You were never being scored in either place, and God has not once compared the man at work with the man in the hall. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a scoreboard down without leaving a man with nothing, and Psalm 131 is the written word underneath it, where the quiet is not a reward for anything.