After The Praise Break

It is twenty to ten on Monday morning and you are filing.

Not metaphorically. Actual files, actual alphabet, a cabinet with a drawer that sticks, and a woman two desks over describing her weekend in a voice that carries.

And yesterday you danced.

Understand what that word is doing, because danced is a small word for it. Yesterday the sound came in the middle of the second song and the whole room went, and you were out in the aisle, and your shoes were somewhere else entirely, and a thing that has been sitting on your chest since March came off it. Not eased. Off. You could feel the difference in the way you breathed walking to the car.

You got home shining. You cooked a proper dinner for the first time in weeks. You messaged three people at eleven at night to tell them you love them.

And now it is twenty to ten on Monday, the drawer is sticking, you cannot find Harrison, and there is a thin, patient voice at the back of your head that has been waiting all morning for you to be still enough to hear it. What it says is: so was that real, then?

Because you feel ordinary. Not bad, particularly. Ordinary, and a little tired, and the thing that came off your chest has not climbed back on exactly, but you are not shining, and the gap between yesterday and this is so total that one of the two has to be a lie.

Then the voice says the quiet part out loud. If that was really God, why does Monday feel like this.

You will not tell anybody. Obviously. You are the woman who danced in front of a whole church yesterday, and there is a version of you living in their heads now, and that version does not stand at a filing cabinet at twenty to ten wondering whether any of it happened.

You find Harrison. You file him.

Ten past ten. Seven hours to go.

Monday is not the audit on Sunday

Start with the sentence Paul wrote to people who had already been set free, and notice that he still had something to tell them.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.Galatians 5:1

Stand fast. That is a posture word, and you do not hand a posture word to somebody who is finding it easy. Nobody says stand fast to a woman on a sofa. You say it to somebody upright in weather, with something pushing.

Which tells you what Paul expected the after to be like, and it is not what your Monday morning voice has been telling you it should be like.

You are as free at twenty to ten on Monday as you were at half past eleven yesterday. Galatians 5:1 says Christ has made us free and then tells us to stand in it, which puts the freedom before the standing rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit does not withdraw the liberty when the shining wears off a person.

Now let me tell you about the biggest praise break in the Bible and what happened the following day.

A man calls fire down in front of a nation. The whole country is face down on the ground shouting that the Lord is God. It is the most dramatic public vindication of God's power in the Old Testament, and the man who stood in the middle of it runs on foot ahead of a chariot in the rain and gets to town ahead of the king.

And in the next chapter he is sitting under a tree in the desert asking God to let him die.

Read what God does about that, because it is the whole doctrine of the after in about four verses. No rebuke. No reminder of yesterday's fire. No sermon about how a man who just called down fire should not be under a tree. An angel touches him and there is bread and a jar of water, and he eats and sleeps, and the angel comes back and touches him a second time and says, essentially, eat again, the journey is too much for you.

Bread. Sleep. A hand on the shoulder. Twice.

You were not being rebuked yesterday and you are not being rebuked this morning. 1 Kings 19 records no lecture at all, the word gives that man food and rest before it gives him a single instruction, and the Spirit of God still deals with a flattened person by feeding them.

So here is what the after actually is, said plainly, because being vague about it is how people get hurt.

The after is hard. Nobody on this page is going to tell you that a rescued woman should be fine by now, and nobody is going to hand you a schedule to fall behind on. The going out was one event. The learning to live outside is a long stretch of ordinary days, and ordinary is not the same thing as false.

And the flatness has a reason that is not spiritual failure. What came off your chest yesterday had been carried for months. A body that has been braced that long does not know what to do with an unbraced Monday, so it does what it knows and goes looking for the weight. Finding nothing there feels like emptiness. It is not emptiness. It is space.

You have not lost anything overnight. Philippians 1:6 says the One who began the good work carries it on and does not abandon it midway, and the word puts the continuing in His hands and not in your Monday mood, and the same Spirit who filled that aisle yesterday is at this filing cabinet with you now, in the boring part, where most of the actual work of freedom happens.