He Has Run Out Of Faces

He heard the gate go and he knew from the walk.

His cousin came across the courtyard fast, with his hands already coming up, and a man only walks like that when he is carrying something he cannot hold in for another twenty steps.

And the face was ready before he reached the table.

That is the part. Not that he made it. That he had it prepared, sitting there, like a jacket by the door.

It is a very good face. Twelve years of practice. The eyebrows do the right thing, the hands go out, the voice pitches up at exactly the place a glad voice pitches up, and nobody has ever once caught it, and he knows that because people keep bringing him their news.

He is the one people tell. That used to mean something warm.

He said the right words. He said them well. He stood up and embraced the man and asked the follow up question that a truly glad person asks, and his cousin sat down at the table beaming.

Then he went inside for more bread.

And he stayed in the kitchen a long time. Longer than the bread needed. He stood with both hands on the counter and the noise of his own courtyard coming through the doorway, and thought a sentence that has been getting closer for about a year.

I have run out of faces.

Not I am envious. He would have taken envious. Envious is a thing a man can repent of on a Tuesday and get on with.

This is quieter and worse. He loves his cousin. He has carried that man's children round this yard on his shoulders. And somewhere in twelve years of waiting for one thing that keeps arriving at other people's gates, the gladness stopped being real and the performance stayed excellent, and now he cannot tell the difference from the inside.

If you have a face you keep ready by the door, come in and sit down in here where the noise is. Nobody is going to ask you to be glad about anything.

Two commands, side by side, and neither one ranked

There is a verse people quote in halves, and quoting it in halves is how it turns into a whip.

Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.Romans 12:15

Both halves are commands, and they sit in the same line, in the same breath, at the same weight.

Which means the man who is weeping is not in a lower category than the man who is rejoicing. They are in the same sentence. And the church is told to show up for both, which is a strange thing to instruct people to do unless it was understood from the beginning that a room would routinely contain both at once.

And notice the shape of the command. It says go and rejoice with them. It does not say generate the feeling first and then attend. The going is the instruction.

You are being commanded to show up rather than to manufacture a feeling, and the command has never once asked you to be finished before you are glad. Romans 12:15 puts the rejoicing and the weeping in one line at equal weight, and the Holy Spirit kept them joined rather than separated into the mature response and the immature one, which means a man standing in a courtyard with a real gladness he cannot feel yet is inside the verse and not outside it.

The face is not the sin

Let us go carefully at what is actually happening, because there is a wrong verdict lying around this kitchen and it has been within reach for a year. The wrong verdict is that the face makes you a fraud.

Here is what the face actually is. It is a man deciding, twelve years running, that his own ache will not be allowed to cost another person their good day. That is not fraud. That is a form of love so unglamorous that nobody has ever thanked anybody for it.

You have twelve years of protecting other people from your own weather, and heaven has not been filing that under hypocrisy. Proverbs 14:10 says the heart knoweth his own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy, and it is written as a plain observation about how people are made rather than as an accusation, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things who has been reading what was under that face the whole time.

What has gone wrong is not the face. What has gone wrong is that there is nowhere the face comes off, and a man who never puts it down anywhere eventually cannot find his own gladness underneath it.

The waiting is not making you smaller

Now the fear, because it is the real one and it has not been said out loud yet.

The fear is that twelve years of this has been quietly turning you into a smaller man, and that one day the good face will be all there is, and there will be nothing left underneath it worth showing anybody.

You were not being reduced in those twelve years, and nothing about waiting has ever been wasted time in the economy of God. James 5:7 tells the reader to be patient as the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth and hath long patience for it, and it is written of a man doing real work in a real field rather than of a man idling, and the Spirit who produces longsuffering as fruit is at work in a courtyard during a wait rather than after it.

Nothing here says the wait ends, and nothing here puts a season on it. What is said is that it is not costing you your size.