I Cried Unpacking The Bags

You were sitting on the floor in the hall with a bag open in front of you and you cried, and you still cannot account for it.

Not for long. Four or five minutes. Something to do with the sand in the bottom of a bag, or a shoe, or nothing identifiable at all.

And then you carried on unpacking and nobody knows.

And here is what has been going on since, and it is worse than the crying was. You have decided there is something wrong with you.

Because the week was good. Genuinely, unambiguously good. Nothing went badly, everybody enjoyed it, and you got the thing you had wanted for two years. And then you sat on a floor and cried about it, which does not fit anywhere, and a person who cries about a good week is a person with something wrong.

That is what I want to take off you, and it is going to take one verse and one distinction, and then a small thing to do about it.

Weeping may endure for a night

There is a line in the thirtieth Psalm about the timing of grief, and what it establishes is that grief has a place in the schedule.

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, King James Version)

You have a verse in the written word that gives weeping a night of its own, and no good week has ever once canceled a person's right to it. Psalm 30:5 has the weeping enduring for a night rather than being corrected out of somebody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific to a woman on a hall floor with a bag open.

Look at what it does with the weeping. It gives it a duration. A night. It is not asked to justify itself, it is not diagnosed, and nothing in the verse suggests that the person weeping had a reason that would stand up.

It is treated as a thing that happens, with a length, inside a life that also has joy in it.

You are able to have a night of weeping inside a good week, and no part of that has ever once needed to make sense to anybody. It is written that weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning, which puts them in sequence rather than in competition, and the Spirit of God is what lets a woman stop investigating her own four minutes.

And notice the whole verse, because the first half matters too. His anger endureth but a moment; in his favor is life.

The Psalm is describing something bigger than a mood: the actual proportions of things in God's dealing with people. Short difficulty, long life, and grief given a defined and temporary place rather than being denied.

You are inside proportions the written word has already set, and no minute of that crying has once been outside them. The Holy Spirit is the one who puts a small grief in a life into a proportion a person can hold, and Psalm 30 gives the weeping a night rather than an argument.

Grief is what the good week produced

Now the distinction, and it is the whole of the practical half.

The crying has been filed as a symptom, as in: something is wrong with me, and this is a sign of it.

Try a different reading. The crying was a product. The week caused it.

You are not looking at a symptom, and no good week has ever once been unable to produce a grief on its own. The Spirit of God is what reclassifies a thing correctly in a person, and it is written that weeping is given a night of its own rather than a cause to be found.

Because here is the mechanism, and it is completely ordinary once you see it. For a week you were somebody slightly different. You slept, you were not managing eleven things, and you were with your own family without half of your attention on a list. And you noticed what that felt like.

And then you came home and unpacked a bag, which is the exact physical act of putting the week away, and the difference between the two versions of your life arrived in you all at once, on a floor, holding a shoe.

That is not a fault. That is what happens to a person who has just felt the contrast.

You are able to feel a contrast without it meaning something is broken, and every one of those four minutes has ever only been you noticing the difference. It is written that in his favor is life, which is said by somebody who had also been in the pit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman have felt something without it becoming a diagnosis.

And here is why it matters that you tell somebody, which is the assignment. Because the thing you have concluded about yourself is untrue, and an untrue conclusion held in silence does not correct itself. It has to meet another person.

Tell one person, and do not explain

So here is the assignment, and the second half is where the whole thing rests.

Tell one person that you cried unpacking. And do not explain it.

One person, whoever is safe. And the sentence is short: when we got back, I sat on the floor unpacking and I cried for a few minutes.

You are able to say one plain sentence about a hall floor, and saying it has never once required you to have understood it. Psalm 30:5 gives the weeping a night without asking it to justify itself, and the Spirit of God is with a woman saying something small out loud on a staircase.

And now the second half. Do not explain it. Not because explanations are wrong, but because you do not have one, and the search for one is what has turned four minutes into three weeks.

If they ask why, say: I do not really know. It was a good week.

You are able to leave it unexplained, and having no reason has never once made it a symptom of anything. It is written that the weeping endures for a night and the joy comes in the morning, with no account of the weeping given at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives an unexplained thing without asking a woman to account for herself.

And here is what will almost certainly happen, and it is the reason to do it. Whoever you tell will say something like: oh, I do that. Or: yes, the coming back is the worst bit.

And then the conclusion you reached about yourself on that floor will not survive, because it was only ever standing because nobody else was in the room.