It Costs Me Three Days

She has the numbers, because she is the kind of person who ends up with numbers.

An evening with four people in her house costs one day before and two days after.

The day before is the cleaning and the cooking and a particular kind of tightening that starts around lunchtime. The two days after are not tiredness in the way other people mean it. They are flat and gray and slightly unwell, and on the second one she is short with people she loves, and then it lifts.

Three days for four hours. She has measured it repeatedly, over about fifteen years, because she wanted very badly for the measurement to come out differently.

And what she has done with that information is call herself unfriendly.

Not out loud. But when the invitation goes unsent, or when she says she will come to theirs instead, the sentence that runs underneath is: other people just have people round.

She wants people. That is what makes the whole thing so wearing. She is not an aloof woman and she is not private and she does not prefer her own company at all. She has been lonely for most of those fifteen years and has watched other people do effortlessly on a Tuesday what costs her half a week.

She has never told one person about the two days after. It sounds like an excuse and it has always sounded like an excuse, and so she has said nothing and simply not invited anybody, for fifteen years.

Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place

Sit down in the armchair a minute, because there is a moment in Mark where the disciples are in demand and the Lord Himself is the one who says stop.

They have come back from being sent out. They are telling Him everything. There are so many people coming and going that they have not had time to eat.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.Mark 6:31

Come ye yourselves apart. And rest a while.

He suggests it. Nobody asks Him for it and nobody complains, and there is no rebuke anywhere in the sentence. He looks at people who are being used up by a genuine and good demand, and He is the one who names the limit out loud.

Hear this in your own front room. Your capacity is not a fault, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has the Lord Himself send people away to rest in the middle of real ministry, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you wanting company through fifteen years of it costing you three days.

Now let me be careful, because I am not going to tell you the cost is imaginary.

It is not imaginary. You measured it and you measured it repeatedly and you wanted the answer to be different. That is not a distorted view of yourself. That is data, and you are not exaggerating it, and I am not going to be the fifth person to imply that you would find it easier if you thought about it differently. The written word has Him name a real limit out loud, and the Spirit of God has never once argued with a body about what it costs.

What is wrong is not the arithmetic. It is what you concluded from it.

You concluded that you are unfriendly, and that is the one thing the numbers do not say. A woman who has been lonely for fifteen years and still wants people is not unfriendly. She is expensive to run, which is an entirely different fact, and it is a fact about a body rather than about a heart.

Hear this too, and let it land where you have sat with the door shut. You have not been failing at friendship, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has Him take people out of a crowd and put them somewhere quiet, and the Spirit of God has never once treated a limit as a character defect.

And now the thing you have never tried, because you have only ever run one experiment.

Every version of this you have ever attempted has been the full evening. Four people, food, an open ended finish, and the day before and the two days after built in from the start. Fifteen years of running the expensive version and concluding you cannot afford company. The written word says come apart and rest a while, and the Holy Spirit has kept the wanting alive in you the whole fifteen years.

You have never once tried the cheap version, and nothing written anywhere required the expensive one, and the Holy Spirit is the one putting the smaller version in front of you now.