Nobody Has to Feel Worse First to Be Allowed to Feel Better

A man told me he had given himself a year, and he was completely calm about it.

He was not depressed, exactly. He had done something that had cost several people something, and it had been dealt with as far as anybody else was concerned, and he had privately decided that a year of feeling terrible was the right amount.

He did not put it in those words. He said he did not want to move on too fast. He said he wanted to make sure he had really felt it.

And underneath that, once we had been talking a while, was a sentence he eventually said out loud, which was: it would be too easy otherwise.

I want to treat that carefully, because there is something real in it. Nobody respects a man who shrugs off what he did to people. That instinct is not corrupt. It is the beginning of something good and it is why I liked him.

But it had turned into a sentence, self imposed, with a length, and the length had been set by a man with no authority to set it and no idea what he was doing.

What the psalm attaches to the nearness

Here is the verse.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18, King James Version)

Is nigh. Present tense. Not: will be nigh once a suitable period has elapsed.

And notice the condition attached, because there is one and it is not what a person expects. The nearness is attached to being of a broken heart, which is a state, not to a duration.

There is no clock in the verse. There is a description of a person and a statement about where God is in relation to them, and the two are simultaneous.

That is the whole problem with a self imposed year. The person serving it is already in the exact condition the verse describes, which means the thing they are waiting to earn is the thing they are currently standing inside.

You are already in the condition that verse attaches His nearness to. Psalm 34:18 says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart with no duration attached. It is the Holy Spirit, John 14:16 given as another Comforter to abide, who is named as the abiding rather than the arriving.

Weeping and joy in the same verse, with a boundary between them

David puts the timing question in one line, and the line is a picture of a boundary rather than of a length.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. (Psalm 30:5)

Weeping may endure for a night. He does not say the night is short and he does not say it is not real. He says it has an end, and that the end is a morning rather than an achievement.

A morning is not something you earn by staying up. It comes because the earth turns. That is the picture he chose and it is exact.

Which is the answer to a man setting his own term. Nobody sets the length of a night. It runs, and it ends, and the ending is not a reward for how well it was endured.

You are in something with a boundary rather than a sentence with a length. Psalm 30:5 puts joy at a morning rather than at the end of a period of suffering. It is the same Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming joy among His fruit rather than among His wages, who supplies what nobody earns by waiting.

God says twice that He wanted mercy rather than the other thing

Jesus quotes a line from Hosea twice in Matthew, which is unusual, and both times He is answering people who thought the correct response to a fallen person was more severity.

But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Matthew 9:13)

Go ye and learn what that meaneth. That is a slightly sharp instruction, and it is aimed at religious professionals who had the theory exactly wrong.

And the original in Hosea sits right beside one of the most compressed pictures of return in the Old Testament:

Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. (Hosea 6:1)

Notice there is no interval in that sentence. Torn and healed. Smitten and bound up. The two halves are pressed together with nothing between them, which is a deliberate way to say it.

You are being called toward mercy rather than toward a longer sentence. Matthew 9:13 says I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, said twice to people who thought otherwise, and it is the Spirit of God, Titus 3:5 naming the renewing of the Holy Ghost, who does the binding up Hosea describes.

What Isaiah says gets given, and what gets taken

Isaiah has a line about the exchange that is very specific about the direction of the trade.

To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. (Isaiah 61:3)

Three trades, all in the same direction, and none of them are earned by staying longer in the first item.

The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Heaviness is the word that describes exactly what my friend had scheduled a year of. And it is not treated as a payment. It is treated as something to be exchanged.

Which means a person sitting in it deliberately, in order to be thorough, is holding on to the currency after the trade has been offered. Not out of stubbornness. Out of a sense of honor that nobody has corrected for them.

You are being offered a trade rather than being charged a term. Isaiah 61:3 gives beauty for ashes and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. It is His Spirit, named in the first verse of that same chapter as being upon Him to do exactly this, who carries the exchange out.

And if the term you have set yourself has stopped feeling like restraint and started feeling like something darker, say it out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A self imposed year is a private arrangement, and private arrangements are the ones that get out of hand quietly.