I Am Relieved And I Feel Bad About It

The last car went at about half past four and something in your chest went down about two inches.

You noticed it happening. That is the trouble. If you had not noticed you would be fine this morning, but you did, and the word for it arrived immediately and unhelpfully, and the word was relief.

And you have been arguing with it ever since.

Because those are your people. Several of them came a long way. Two of them you actually wanted to see and were glad the whole time you were talking to them. Nothing bad happened at any point in that day. And still, when the last set of lights went down the road, something in you unclenched, and it unclenched fast.

So the conclusion has been forming since about five o'clock last night, and by this morning it has more or less arrived: a better man would have wanted them to stay.

Let me tell you what I think the relief actually was, because it is not what you have decided.

You were not relieved that they went. You were relieved that the effort stopped.

Those are entirely different things and they feel identical from the inside, and almost nobody separates them, which is why almost every man who notices that unclench spends a week thinking badly of himself.

He knoweth our frame

There is a verse about how God assesses a person, and the assessment is far lower than the one running in that kitchen this morning.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. (Psalm 103:13-14, King James Version)

He knoweth our frame. Frame is a structural word. It is about what a thing is built out of and what load it will take.

And then, in case that were too gentle: he remembereth that we are dust. Not that we are weak. Dust. That is the plainest possible statement about human capacity and it is made by the one doing the assessing. Now notice what that produces. It does not produce disappointment. The verse before says He pities us as a father pities his children, and the knowing of the frame is given as the reason.

He is not surprised by your capacity. He set it.

You are being assessed by somebody who already knows exactly what you are built to take, and it is written into the psalm that He knoweth our frame and remembereth that we are dust. The written word gives the low estimate and the pity in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than an insult.

And the estimate God holds is lower than yours.

You have been holding yourself to a standard higher than the one heaven uses, and Psalm 103:14 puts the remembering of dust in the mouth of the one who made it. Scripture puts a father's pity beside the knowledge of a frame, and the Spirit of God is the one who lowers a bar that a man has been raising on himself since five o'clock.

What the effort actually was

Let me be exact about what stopped at half past four, because it is worth an inventory.

Eleven hours of being on. Not working, exactly. On. Available, warm, attentive, funny at the right moments, aware of who was where and what was happening. That is a continuous output and it does not switch off between conversations.

You also carried the practical layer underneath it: the driving, the fetching, the thing that broke, the person who needed something at the wrong moment.

And under that, the third layer that never gets counted: monitoring. Watching how everybody was doing. Noticing the two who needed to not be in the same corner. Registering the mood of the room every few minutes without ever deciding to. Three simultaneous loads for eleven hours, and all three ended in the same four seconds when a door shut.

You were carrying three loads at once for eleven hours, and the written word describes a God who knows precisely what a human frame will take. Psalm 103:14 puts that knowledge in the assessor rather than in the person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names three loads that nobody in that house ever counted.

And here is why the unclench was so fast and so obvious. A load that ends gradually produces no sensation. A load that ends in four seconds produces a very noticeable one, and the sensation is not a judgment about the people who left.

It is a body reporting the end of a shift.

You were feeling a shift end rather than a family leave, and Scripture gives the pity and the knowledge of the frame in the same sentence. Psalm 103:14 makes the dust the reason for tenderness, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a man the difference between relief and preference.

Say it without a defense

So here is the assignment, and the second half of it is the whole point.

Say the plain sentence about the relief out loud to God, and add no defense to it.

The plain sentence. I was relieved when they went.

And then nothing. No qualification. Not: but I was glad they came. Not: I do love them. Not: it was a good day, though.

You are able to say a true thing without immediately defending yourself against it, and it has never once been required that a sentence be balanced before it may be said. Psalm 103:14 has God state the dust plainly and offer pity rather than a correction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives an undefended sentence from a man in a kitchen.

And I want to say why the defense is the thing to leave out.

Every time that sentence has come round in the last eighteen hours, a defense has been appended to it, and the appending is what has kept it alive. A sentence that has to be defended is a sentence that is being charged with something. There has been a small trial running all morning with one man prosecuting and defending at the same time.

Said plainly, with nothing after it, it stops being a charge and becomes a report. And a report does not require a verdict.

You are making a report rather than entering a plea, and the written word puts the plainest possible statement about human capacity into the mouth of the one who made it. Psalm 103:14 says he remembereth that we are dust and follows it with pity, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives what a man says with no case attached.