The Space Where The Anger Was

You did it. That is what nobody understands about your situation, including the people who kept telling you to.

For about eleven years you were angry, and it was not a temper and it was not a personality, it was a specific and accurate anger about a specific thing that was done, and it got you out of bed. It made you phone people. It made you sit in the back of meetings you had no business being in and ask the question everybody else had agreed not to ask.

And people told you, gently and repeatedly, that it was eating you.

They were right. It was. And four years ago you laid it down, properly, in a genuine transaction that you could describe to somebody if you ever had to, and it has never come back.

Here is what nobody warned you about.

Nothing came.

There is a flat, level, ordinary space where it used to be, and it is four years old now, and you have never once said this out loud because it sounds exactly like a woman who wants her anger back and that is not what this is.

You do not want it back. You would not have it back.

But the anger was the thing that made you useful. It was the reason you were in those rooms. And when it went, the phoning stopped and the questions stopped and the rooms went on without you, and everybody said how well you looked, and you have been quietly, politely disappearing for four years.

Isaiah names an exchange and then names the outcome

There is a passage everybody knows the middle of and hardly anybody reads to the end, and the end is where it stops being comfort and starts being an appointment.

To give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.Isaiah 61:3

Three exchanges, and then a clause that turns the whole thing into a commission.

That they might be called trees of righteousness. That is not a description of somebody who has been comforted. A tree is a fixed thing in a landscape that other people navigate by, that holds ground together, that gives shade to people who did not plant it.

And notice the word planting. Somebody is put somewhere on purpose.

So take this now, four years in. You are not a woman who was emptied. The written word never once describes an exchange that ends in a space, and the Holy Spirit does not take a fire out of a person and leave a hole where the fire was.

An exchange means something goes in the other direction. What has actually happened to you is that half the transaction was preached at you for eleven years and the other half was never mentioned by anybody.

The anger was carrying something and it needs a new carrier

Now let me say the useful thing, because comfort on its own would leave you exactly where you are, and the written word offers an exchange rather than a comfort while the Holy Spirit does the planting.

The anger was not the point. Underneath the anger, the whole time, there was something else, and the anger was simply the thing that carried it.

What was underneath was that you cannot bear to see somebody treated the way that person was treated. That is not anger. That is a permanent feature of who you are and it did not go anywhere four years ago. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

The fuel went. The engine did not.

And nobody handed you a new fuel, because nobody in your life had ever thought about it, and because it is genuinely much harder to describe. Anger is easy to name. Whatever it is that gets a woman out of bed at fifty-two when she is not angry is harder to name, and it is real, and God has it.

You are a planting and not a clearing. His word puts trees at the end of the exchange, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the planting, and four flat years are not the finished shape of this.

What was preached in a plain hall

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and one of the things preached in that plain room was being wholly set apart to God.

That teaching goes wrong in exactly one way, and it is the way it has gone wrong around you: it gets preached as the laying down, and never as the taking up.

A person is told what to put out of their hands. Nobody is standing there to put something into them.

That hall did not have that problem, and the reason is not that its preachers were better. It is that the building ran missions in the streets around it, and a person who had just laid something down was inside a place that needed both her hands by the following Tuesday.

The laying down and the sending were the same week.

The written word puts trees at the end of the exchange, and the Holy Spirit has never taken a thing out of a person's hands in order to leave them empty.