Enough To Stop Performing Calm

Adaeze has been the calm one for so long that two of her closest friends do not know she has a figure in her head at all.

She is not lying to them. Nobody has ever asked. There is a role that gets handed to certain people quite early, usually because they were competent in a crisis once when they were young, and after that everybody in a family or a church or a workplace quietly agrees who the steady one is, and nobody ever revisits it.

Adaeze is the steady one. She has been the steady one since she was about twenty-four.

The calm is not entirely a performance, and I want to be fair to her. Some of it is real. She genuinely does not panic, she is genuinely good in a hard hour, and people are right to bring her things.

But underneath it there is a figure, and the figure has a job, and the job is this: when there is that much, she will not have to hold her face any more.

She has never said that to a single person. She has never even said it to herself in those words until a Thursday last spring, when she was sitting in a hospital corridor being the calm one for somebody else's family, and a nurse who did not know her from anybody put a hand on her arm and said, and how are you doing.

And Adaeze said fine, in her voice, and the nurse looked at her for a second longer than she needed to and then went away.

And Adaeze sat there and thought: I have a number for when I get to stop doing this.

Now hear the necessary thing, because a capable woman will turn this into another failure and I am not permitting that.

Adaeze is not a fraud. The steadiness has been real work and real love, and there are people who got through the worst weeks of their lives because she held her face. That is not nothing and it is not undone by anything in this message. God saw all of it.

And nothing here is going to tell her that having a figure is faithless, or that a woman who prepares does not trust God. That is a lie and it has been used to shame people who were holding a household up with both hands.

The problem is not the figure and it is not the calm.

The problem is that the two of them have been tied together, so that the calm cannot be put down until the figure arrives, and the figure has been moving for eleven years.

You have your own version. There is a face you hold, and there is an amount at which you have quietly agreed you would be allowed to stop holding it.

Nobody is calling you a performer. What you have been doing is closer to service than to acting.

But it has never once had an end date that stayed still.

The psalm admits the failure before it names the strength

There is a line in Psalm 73 that almost everybody quotes from the second half, and the first half is what makes it usable.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

My flesh and my heart faileth. He says it flatly, in the present tense, about himself, in a psalm he then put in the songbook for the whole nation to sing.

He does not say it used to fail before he got his theology sorted out. He does not build to it as a confession he has since recovered from. He states it as a current condition and then, in the same breath, names where the strength is coming from instead.

That is permission, and it is the permission this article exists to hand over. You are allowed to be a person whose heart fails. That is not my indulgence: it is in the written word, in the first person, in a song, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land on a woman in a hospital corridor who has just said fine to a nurse.

And the strength is already His to supply. Not once you have permission to stop: the word says God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever, and portion is a measured, recorded, legally held share, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a possession rather than an idea.

Notice what David does not do. He does not resolve the failing. The verse does not say his heart stopped failing. It says something else is now holding it up, which is a completely different kind of answer and a much better one.

Nobody is coming for your steadiness

I want to be plain, because this is where a message like this tells a capable woman to fall apart in order to prove something, and that would be a stupid and cruel instruction.

Nobody here is telling you to stop being good in a crisis. That is a gift and the people around you need it and there is nothing false about it.

Nobody is telling you to announce anything, or to have a conversation with your family about what you have been carrying, or to hand your role to somebody who cannot do it.

And nobody is telling you the figure should be lower. Not lower, not higher. I do not know your household, and naming somebody else's safe number from a page is meddling in a life you cannot see.

The move here is much smaller than any of that. It is only that the calm and the figure are being untied from each other, so that one of them stops being the price of the other.

And you are held while your heart fails. That is not a contradiction: the written word says my flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart, in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes both halves of that true in the same woman on the same afternoon.

And you already have permission to be tired in His presence. Not once you have earned it by holding on longer: the word says come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and it is addressed to people who are still carrying something rather than to people who have put it down, and the Spirit is the one who makes that invitation feel like it includes you.