The Only Room I Cannot Organize

Give her a mess and forty minutes and she will hand it back to you in rows.

That is not a boast; she would be embarrassed by the way it is put. It is simply what she is for, and everybody in her life knows it. When her sister's wedding fell apart eleven days out, she rebuilt it on a Tuesday. When the food bank was drowning in unsorted stock she went in for a weekend and it has run properly ever since. She is the one people ring at the point where a thing has become too big to think about, and she thinks about it, and it stops being too big.

She is forty one and she has never once been beaten by a mess.

Since the spring there has been a room in her she cannot get into.

She would not call it depression and she has thought carefully about whether that is the honest word and decided, so far, that it is not. She sleeps. She eats. She is not sad most days.

It is that the inside of her has no shape in it. There is a thing that happened in April, and there are two things that happened afterward that are connected to it, and when she tries to look at any of that directly it slides. It will not hold still long enough to be sorted. She cannot get a list out of it. She has tried, twice, with a pen, the way she would with anybody else's problem, and both times she got four words down and then just sat there.

Four words. She, who reorganized a food bank in a weekend.

And what has quietly grown up around that, over five months, is a low sense of failure that she cannot even locate properly. She is not failing at anything anybody can see. Every visible thing in her life is in rows.

It is only the one room. And in the one room there is nothing for a gift like hers to get hold of.

Last month she said something out loud in her car that she has not repeated. She said: I have no idea how to do this and it is the only thing I have ever said that about.

You know the room. Yours may be the whole house or one drawer. But you know what it is to have real ability that turns out not to work in the one place it is needed.

The deep was not asked for a list

Let me name the pit before we go near the verse, because if this lands as a criticism of your competence it will be useless.

The pit is not incapacity. You are the most capable person most people in your life know, and that is not flattery, it is the reason this hurts. The pit is that the one thing you have never done is be in a formless place without being responsible for its shape, and so the moment a formless place appeared inside you, the only tool you had was the tool that has always worked, and it does not reach in there, and you have read that as failure for five months.

Here is the second sentence in the Bible.

The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2

Look at the state of it. Formless. Void. Dark. Nothing holding still long enough to be sorted, and no list obtainable from any of it.

And now look at what is happening over it, and at what is not happening in it.

The Spirit of God is moving over the face of the waters, and the word is a brooding word: Deuteronomy 32:11 uses the same picture for an eagle spreading herself over her nest and her young. Over. Not in. The deep is not being organized from the inside. Nothing in it is being asked to cooperate, produce, sort or hold still.

Here I teach one thing about the Hebrew and I draw the line in the same breath, because on this ground the two never travel apart. The word for Spirit there is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and it is a feminine word in Hebrew grammar, so the verb beside it takes a feminine form, exactly as it would with the word for a hand or a city. Grammar is not sex. God is neither male nor female; Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture describes Him with a father's traits and a mother's both, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly pictures and He chose it for Himself. It does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true, and the picture is what you need.

Take that in the car, and know it is not my consolation, it is the second sentence of the Bible. You are being brooded over in a place you cannot organize. Genesis 1:2 has the Spirit over a deep that could not have produced a list if its life depended on it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is over the room in you that has had no shape since April.

And then the next verse settles where order comes from, permanently.

And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3

Above the water. By a word. Not by the deep pulling itself together, and not by the deep being unusually good at pulling things together, which is the only version of this you have ever needed before.

The one room was never yours to sort, and your gift is not failing. That is Genesis 1:2 and 1:3 read in order, and it is the Holy Spirit who is doing the part you cannot reach, and He has been doing it since April in a place you cannot see into.