I Only Enjoy It Afterward

You are always about a month behind your own life.

That is the shape of it, and I want to say it accurately because it is not the same thing as being unable to enjoy anything.

You enjoy things. You enjoy them a great deal. It just happens later. Four weeks after a day, you will be doing something ordinary, and the day will arrive in you properly, and you will feel about it what everybody else appeared to feel about it at the time.

And on the day itself you were pleasant, and present, and observing it from about a foot outside.

This is not misery and it is not ingratitude and nobody in your family has ever complained about it. It is a timing problem, and it is your own timing, and you have started to be tired of it because you are aware of how many days you have now enjoyed exclusively in retrospect.

There is a verse in Zephaniah I want to put next to that, and the tense in it is the whole of what I have to offer.

He will joy over thee with singing

There is a sentence near the end of Zephaniah that is startling if you read what it says God is doing rather than what He is going to do.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing. (Zephaniah 3:17, King James Version)

You have a verse in the written word where God is described as rejoicing over people in the middle of them, and no delay in your own gladness has once been able to postpone that. Zephaniah 3:17 puts God in the midst of thee and rejoicing rather than waiting to see how things turn out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that concrete on an ordinary afternoon.

Look at the location first. In the midst of thee. Not observing from outside. Inside the situation, present, in the middle of the people.

And then what He is doing there. Rejoicing over thee with joy. Resting in His love. Joying over thee with singing.

That is a description of somebody who is glad at the time. Not afterward, and not conditionally.

You are already being rejoiced over while the afternoon is happening, and no lateness in your own feeling has once changed what was going on in the middle of it. It is written that the LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty and joys over thee with singing, which is present and located, and the Spirit of God is what makes a woman aware of a gladness that was not hers.

That is the thing worth having. On every one of those days you enjoyed a month later, something was glad about it at the time.

So the gladness was not absent from the afternoon. Yours was late, which is a different and much smaller problem.

You are not the person who has to supply the gladness in a day, and no afternoon has ever once gone by unrejoiced over because your own feeling arrived in October. The Holy Spirit is the one who was singing over an afternoon a woman experienced from a foot outside, and Zephaniah 3 has the rejoicing in the midst rather than at the end.

Feeling follows saying more often than the reverse

Now the practical part, and it is one specific mechanism, and it is the only thing in this article you have to do.

There have almost certainly been attempts to feel glad in the moment, and they do not work, because feelings do not take instructions. Nobody has ever successfully told themselves to enjoy something.

But there is a thing that does work, and it runs the other way round, and most people have it backward.

Saying a glad thing out loud produces some of the feeling. Not all of it, and not reliably, but genuinely some, and considerably more than deciding to feel it does.

You are able to move the feeling by saying something rather than by intending something, and no attempt at intending it has once been able to do what a sentence does. The Spirit of God is what makes a spoken thing land in the person who spoke it, and it is written that the rejoicing over is done with singing, which is out loud rather than internal.

That is not a psychological trick. Look at the verse. The rejoicing described there is not silent. It is singing, which is the loudest available form of it, and the Bible describes God's own gladness as something expressed rather than merely felt.

You are able to say it before you feel it, and doing it in that order has never once made the gladness less real when it comes. It is written he will joy over thee with singing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman says a true glad sentence out loud on a lakeshore before she feels anything much.

And the reason this suits you specifically is that you are not short of the material. You notice everything. Your problem has never been perception, it is that the noticing stays inside and does not come out, and so it does not complete.

A sentence completes it.

One glad sentence, out loud, in the hour

So here is the assignment.

Say one true glad sentence out loud while the thing is still happening.

One. Not a habit, not a running commentary. One sentence, at some point during the next good hour, said out loud where at least one person can hear it.

You are able to say one sentence during an afternoon, and one has never once been too few to change where a day sits in you. Zephaniah 3:17 has the gladness expressed as singing rather than held inside, and the Spirit of God is with a woman opening her mouth at a lake.

And it has to be true, which is the only rule. Not this is lovely, if it is not. Say the actual true thing, which is usually smaller and more specific: I like this. Or: look at her. Or: I am glad we came.

Say it out loud, to a person, in ordinary words. Not to yourself, because inside your head is where the whole problem lives.

You are able to say a small true thing rather than a large one, and its size has never once decided whether it did anything. It is written that the LORD is in the midst of thee, present and glad at the time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary sentence do something in the person who says it.

And expect it to feel exposing, because it will. Saying I am glad we came, out loud, in the middle of a day, is a small act of commitment to that day, and you have spent years reserving judgment until later.

Then let it be whatever it is. The feeling may arrive and it may not. What will happen is that the day is anchored somewhere other than in retrospect, and after four or five of those you will notice a difference in when things reach you.