Gladness Is Not A Thing You Make

The bone folder is still in his coat pocket and he keeps finding it with his thumb at bus stops.

It is a flat piece of bone the length of a finger, worn down along one edge by thirty years of creasing paper, and it is the only tool he kept. The nipping press went to a man with a van in the second week. The brass finishing tools went as a set, which was right, because they are no use split up, and the man who bought them knew exactly what they were.

It is a Tuesday morning at ten. He still wakes at six. That is the thing nobody warns a man about: the body carries on turning up for the job after the job has gone. He gets up, he makes the tea, and then there is the whole of a Tuesday and nowhere at all to be in it.

Five weeks since the last day. Here is what five weeks is. The two people who worked with him have both landed somewhere, one at a printers and one retraining, and he is genuinely glad of it. The workshop smelled of wheat paste and leather dust and that particular sweetness of old paper, and he cannot get that smell anywhere and has caught himself trying.

The last thing he bound was a family bible with a broken spine, and he did it properly, sewn on cords, because a man does not do a poor job at the end.

He is not desperate. That is the thing he would want anybody to understand. He is simply flat, in a way he never has been, and everything tastes of nothing, and Sunday lunch at his brother's last weekend was a room full of people laughing and him watching it through glass.

And what frightens him, in a way he has said out loud to nobody at all, is that he has begun to think this is simply how it is now. That the good part has been used up. That a man of sixty one who is flat in February stays flat.

Somebody at church told him gently to count his blessings, and that joy is a choice. He nodded. He walked home past the shuttered front of the workshop, and he thought: I have counted them. The counting is not the trouble. I cannot make myself feel one single thing, and I have run clean out of ideas about how a man is supposed to manufacture it.

Maybe that is roughly where you are this morning. Not sad exactly. Just flat, quietly certain the good part is over, and tired of people handing you gladness as a job to be getting on with.

The word, before anything gets poured

The word on the front of this site sounds like money, and in the fifth week after a business closes that is a cruel thing to leave vague, so let me deal with it now.

Abundance is not money. It is not the workshop reopening, it is not a buyer appearing, and it is not the presses back in a room with his name over the door. It means fullness of life, which is the thing John 10 actually says: the Shepherd came so that His own would have life and have it over the brim. The noun is life. It always was life.

And fullness of life includes gladness, which is exactly what this page is about, but gladness is not a mood a man produces in order to prove the fullness is really there. That distinction is the whole of what follows.

You have life offered to you at the brim on a flat Tuesday, with the smell of the workshop gone and nothing at all in the diary, and it is not being held back until somebody feels better about it. That is not my encouragement, it stands written in John 10, and the Holy Spirit carries a written promise into a man who cannot feel anything and knows it.

Oil is poured, and it is never manufactured

Here is the line this whole site is named out of, and the grammar of it is the point.

the oil of gladness instead of mourningIsaiah 61:3

Oil is poured. It is poured by somebody, onto somebody. In the whole of the Scriptures nobody ever makes oil happen to themselves: the prophet pours it, the host pours it over a guest at the door, the woman pours it out of an alabaster jar. It arrives from outside the person and runs down.

So when somebody says joy is a choice, they have taken hold of a half truth by the wrong end. Choosing where to look is a real thing and it matters. But the gladness itself is not a product a man manufactures out of the right attitude, and telling a flat man to generate some is very like telling a dry field to rain.

You were never asked to manufacture it. Not once, not anywhere in the word of God. The oil in Isaiah 61 is given to people who are mourning rather than to people who have got their outlook sorted out, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the pouring rather than the one standing there assessing anybody's technique.

Look at who He gives it to

Look at who receives the oil in that verse. Mourners. Not recovered mourners. Not people who are nearly through it and only need topping up.

That matters enormously for a man five weeks in, because the whole instinct is to assume the gladness is for people further along, and that flatness has to be dealt with first as a sort of qualification. It runs the other way. The oil goes to the ones in mourning, while they are in it, and it goes to them because of who God is rather than because of where they have got to.

And nobody here is going to tell you when anything will be felt. I do not know. Nothing on this page sets a date, and the man who promises a mourner a timeline has stopped ministering and started guessing.

You are qualified for that oil by grief and not by recovery, which is precisely what Isaiah 61 says out loud, and His Spirit is the one who pours whatever is poured whenever it is poured, and none of the timing of it sits on anybody's shoulders.

What flat is, and what it is not

One more thing, because this is where a good man wrecks himself.

Flatness is not unbelief. It is not backsliding. It is not a failure of gratitude, and it is not what the Scriptures mean by a hard heart. It is what happens to a person after a loss, in the body as much as anywhere else, and the Bible is perfectly familiar with it. Elijah under the tree. David saying his soul melts away for heaviness. Whole psalms written by men who could not raise a feeling between them.

God treats it as weather rather than as sin. He fed Elijah and let him sleep. That was the entire first installment of the treatment.

You have not been disqualified by five weeks of feeling nothing, and the word of God never once made receiving conditional on a mood, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting at the edge of a flat Tuesday for a man to cheer up before He will come near.