The Man Who Does Not Laugh at His Own Table

It is one of the loudest families you have ever been near, and it is loud in the good way, and he is at the head of it.

Sunday, and it starts at two and the last of them go at eight. There are between fourteen and twenty two depending on the week. There is always somebody in the doorway telling something with their whole body while the others shout corrections. His mother's sisters. His own daughters, who are twenty six and thirty. Somebody's boyfriend being teased and enjoying it.

And in the middle of all of it there is a man of fifty four who is having a lovely time and cannot feel it.

That is the exact shape of it and he has never found a way to say it. He is not sad. That is what makes it so hard to raise. Somebody who is sad can say so and be met. He is not sad, he is not depressed in the way that would send him to a doctor, and if you asked him whether he loves these people he would look at you as if you had asked whether he needed his lungs.

He simply does not feel it. He watches it. He has watched it, at that table, for something like nine years.

He can tell you the moment he first noticed, and it is unhelpfully small: a Sunday when his youngest did an impression of an uncle and the whole room went, and he laughed at the correct volume, and heard himself do it, and knew he had produced the sound rather than made it.

Since then it has been like watching a very good film about a family he loves.

He has said nothing. There is no way to say it in that house that would not frighten somebody. And on the list, which he learned as a boy and has never got away from, the second one is joy, and the second one is the one that is not there.

The back step gets the last of the sun and he goes out for a minute most Sundays, ostensibly for the plates.

You know that step. It might not be joy for you. But there is a room you love that you are watching from behind glass, and you have not said so, because saying it would frighten somebody who does not deserve to be frightened. There is a line at the end of Psalm 16 that says something exact about where joy is actually kept.

In thy presence is fullness of joy

I have to be careful here, and more careful than usual, because this is exactly where somebody normally prescribes. Practice gratitude. Keep a joy journal. Do the thing where you name three good things every night for a month. I am not going to do it. Joy is on the list in Galatians as fruit of the Spirit, and a man of fifty four who takes joy on as a personal project will be running that project at sixty and will have added failure to a thing that is already hard enough.

David, at the end of a psalm about God being his portion and his cup, says this: Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Psalm 16:11).

Read where the joy is. In thy presence. Not in a practice, not in a temperament, not in the person. It is located, and the location is God, and the fullness is there whether or not the man standing on a back step can feel a thing.

You have been trying to grow something that is kept somewhere else. That is not me stretching the psalm; Psalm 16:11 puts the fullness of joy in God's presence and not in the psalmist, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line specified an address.

And notice what David asks for first in the same verse: thou wilt shew me the path of life. He asks to be shown the way there. He does not ask to be made a more joyful man. The whole verse is about direction and location rather than about disposition.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.Psalm 16:11

Watching is not the same as absence

Now the thing that has been running for nine years, because he has drawn a conclusion from it and the conclusion is wrong.

He has concluded that a man who does not feel it does not have it. That is the whole of the argument and it has never been examined because it has never been said to a soul.

And here is what is true instead. He has sat at that table for nine years. He is still there. He still gets up at two on a Sunday. He has never once cut it short, never made an excuse, never let the number drop below fourteen. A man watching a room he cannot feel, who keeps coming back to that room every week for nine years, is doing something that a person with no joy at all could not sustain.

You have never been able to see the thing from inside it. 2 Corinthians 5:7 says we walk by faith and not by sight, and the walking is the evidence and the seeing is not; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has had a man at the head of a table for four hundred and something Sundays.

This is yours right now, on a step with the plates: a fullness kept in His presence and not in your chest. Psalm 16:11 gives the address; the Spirit who inspired it did not require the man to be able to feel the room in order to be standing in it.

Fruit does not arrive on request

Let me say the thing about the list, because he learned it as a boy and it has been quietly at work ever since.

Galatians 5:22 says the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, and the rest. Fruit of the Spirit. It is a genitive and it names the owner. A branch does not decide which fruit comes in, or when, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, which is not a rebuke, it is a description of how growing has always worked.

Nine years of not feeling joy is not nine years of a man failing at joy. It is nine years in which a particular fruit has not come in on a branch that has stayed attached the whole time.

You were attached through every one of those Sundays and the attachment was never measured by what you could feel. John 15:4 makes abiding a place rather than a sensation; the Holy Spirit is the sap, and sap is not a feeling.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. Out on that step, in the ten minutes with the plates, tell Him one true thing about the room behind you with nothing asked for and no assessment attached. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody grades that.