The Woman Who Used To Cry In Meetings

She was down the front for about fifteen years.

Everybody knew it about her. Third row, hands up, face gone, and someone would come and stand with her, and it was not a performance and nobody in that building ever thought it was. It was simply what happened to her when the room started to sing.

The young women watched her for it. Two of them have told her so since.

She now stands at the back with her arms folded.

She wants it said clearly that she is not angry. That is the first thing everybody assumes and it is wrong. She is not bitter at the church, she has not fallen out with anybody, she has not stopped believing one line of it. She is there every week, early, and she puts the chairs out.

She simply does not go anywhere any more.

The music comes up and she stands in it, and something in her chest that used to open just does not, and she has watched it not happen for four years now, week after week, in the same room where it used to happen every single time.

Here is the part she has told nobody.

The hardest thing is not that she does not cry. It is that she remembers exactly what it was like. She can remember it the way you remember a smell, completely and uselessly, and she cannot get back to it from where she is standing.

She has tried. That is the other thing nobody knows. She has gone home and put the music on alone in the house. She has knelt down. She has gone back to the third row twice, deliberately, on purpose, and stood there, and felt herself standing there.

Something grew over the top of her while she was waiting for a thing that has not come, and she did not notice it growing, and she cannot get it off.

If you have gone hard on the outside of a long wait, come and stand at this end of the row. Fold your arms if you want to. Nobody here is watching your face.

Read the verbs, and notice whose they are

There is a promise about hard hearts that people quote at each other as an encouragement, and almost everybody reads it as a job.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

Count them. I will give. I will put. I will take away. I will give.

Four verbs and every one of them is His.

There is not one instruction in that verse. Nobody is told to soften themselves, or to work up a feeling, or to remember what it used to be like and try to get back there. The person in that sentence is entirely on the receiving end of every clause.

And notice who it is spoken to. A people in exile, a long way into a wait that had already outlasted everybody's patience, who had gone hard exactly the way people do.

You are being described in a verse where every single verb belongs to God, and the softening was never listed among your responsibilities. Ezekiel 36:26 puts the taking away and the giving in His own hands four times over, and the Holy Spirit kept it addressed to people deep inside a wait rather than to people at the end of one, which means the thing you have been trying to do at home with the music on has never once been yours to do.

The hardness is not the same as coldness

Let us be exact about what has grown over you, because the word for it matters and the wrong word has been doing damage.

You have been calling it coldness. Cold suggests a woman who stopped caring, and that is plainly not what happened, and the mismatch is what has kept the circling going for four years. It is not coldness. It is scar tissue. That is a different thing entirely. Scar tissue is what a body grows over a place that was hurt, and it is thicker and less feeling than what it replaced, and it is not a betrayal of the body. It is the body doing what it does when something is not allowed to keep bleeding.

You have a covering that grew over a wound rather than a hardness that grew instead of a heart. Psalm 147:3 says He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds, and it is written of a God who attends to damage rather than one who inspects it, and the same Spirit who is called the Comforter has been in that back row every one of those four years.

What the folded arms have actually been doing

Now the arms, because that is what everybody sees and nobody has asked about.

Folded arms across a chest are what a person does over a sore place. That is all they are. They are not a verdict on the room, and they are not defiance, and they have not once been read that way by the God you are standing in front of.

You were protecting something that was hurt, and protecting it has never been counted against you. Isaiah 42:3 says a bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench, and it is written of somebody handling damaged things carefully rather than testing them, and it is His Spirit who carries a word at the weight a person can take, which means nobody in heaven has been waiting for you to unfold your arms before they would deal with you.

Nothing here says the wait ends and nothing here puts a season on it. What is said is that you were not shrinking during it.