Nobody Has Ever Seen You Angry

People say it about you as a compliment and they have been saying it for about twenty years.

She is so calm. Nothing rattles her. In a crisis you want her in the room.

And all of it is observably true. You have not raised your voice since you were about nineteen. Not at your children, not at your husband, not at the man at the garage who was plainly lying to you, not on the worst night of the worst year.

Here is what actually happens, and you have never described it to anybody.

Somebody says the thing. And there is a movement, about two seconds long, and it is not heat. It is the opposite. Something goes out, like a tap being closed in a wall somewhere behind you, and by the time you speak, your voice is level and slightly kind and completely, absolutely unreachable.

And it works. It has always worked. It ends arguments before they start, and nobody has ever been able to get a grip on you, and it has protected you since you were nineteen from a house you have never talked about.

But your daughter said something in July. Not cruelly. She was upset and she said it the way you say a thing you have been holding for a while.

She said: I would honestly rather you shouted at me.

And you did the thing. Right there, in the kitchen, in front of her, you felt the tap close and you heard your own voice come out level and slightly kind, and you watched her face do something, and you understood in that moment exactly what she was asking for and that you could not give it to her.

Because it is not a choice. That is what nobody knows. You are not choosing to be calm. You cannot get to the other thing at all.

David asks for the one thing nobody asks for

There is a prayer at the end of a psalm that is quoted often and prayed rarely, and if you look at it carefully it is a strange thing to say and only one kind of person ever says it.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.Psalm 139:23

He asks to be searched.

Not helped. Not comforted. Not forgiven, not yet, not in that line. Searched, by God, in the place where he cannot see, because the whole psalm before it has been about a God who is already everywhere and already knows and cannot be got away from.

And here is why that is the exact prayer for a woman who goes cold.

You cannot search yourself. That is your actual situation and it is not a moral failure, it is a locked door. Whatever happens when the tap closes happens below the level you have access to, and twenty years of intelligent self-examination has not got you one inch further in, because you are asking the part of you that closes the tap to report on the tap.

So take this now, standing in the kitchen where she said it. You are not unreachable to God. The written word invites the searching and the Holy Spirit is the one who does it, and the room you cannot get into is not a room He is locked out of.

The cold is not a sin and it is not peace

Now let me hold both halves, carefully, because the written word holds both and the Holy Spirit is gentler with you than the well meaning people who have handed you only one of them for years.

The cold is not a sin. Whatever you have quietly suspected about yourself at three in the morning, that thing was built by a girl of about eleven in a house where heat was dangerous, and she built it well, and it kept her alive, and God has never once been angry with her about it.

And the cold is not peace, and you know it, and the reason this article found you is that somebody you love finally said so out loud.

Peace has warmth in it. Peace can be argued with. A woman at peace can be got at by her own daughter in a kitchen, and can be hurt by her, and can say so.

What you have is a door that closes very fast and cannot be opened from your side.

You have a God who searches what you cannot. That is written into the psalm itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who goes in, and twenty years of not being able to find your own anger has not put you outside His reach.

The plain hall and the inward work

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and the doctrine preached in that plain room was a clean heart: God's own work, done on the inside, given to people who had been treated as though they were not the sort who got one.

The room and the doctrine are one thing, and pulled apart, this teaching does real damage to a woman like you.

Preached where the good seats are bought, an inward work becomes something to be seen to have, and a woman whose whole survival is a well managed surface simply adds a spiritual surface to the ones she already keeps. Now she is calm and she is serene, and there are two doors instead of one.

Preached in a plain hall, it stays what it is. Nobody is watching. There is nothing to be seen to have. It is an operation, done by God, on somebody who cannot do it herself.

You are eligible exactly as you are, unable to feel it. The written word puts every part of the work in His hands, and the Holy Spirit does not need you to warm up first.