I Cannot Remember The Last Time I Was Pleased

You tried to think of the last one.

That is what happened after the leaf. You stood there, and you felt something, and then you went looking backward for the previous time you had felt it, the way a man checks the date on something.

And you could not find one.

Not a bad year exactly. Nothing dramatic happened. It was just a year that went by, and somewhere in it the ordinary small pleasures stopped registering, and nobody noticed including you.

And then a rolled up leaf on a windowsill, and something came up through the floor.

So the article is not about the leaf.

That was the first one in a year, and the fact that you had to go looking is the real news here.

The joy of the LORD is your strength

Nehemiah records a moment where people are weeping because they have finally understood something, and they are told to stop.

Then he said unto them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength. (Nehemiah 8:10, King James Version)

For the joy of the LORD is your strength.

You are being handed joy as a supply line rather than as a reward, and no dry year has ever once cut you off from what that verse calls strength. Nehemiah 8:10 says the joy of the LORD is your strength, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a man who could not find the last good thing.

Look at the argument being made. It is not: cheer up because things are better than you think.

It is that joy is where the strength comes from, which makes it structural rather than decorative. Not the reward for having coped. The thing you cope with.

And the instruction around it is startlingly physical. Eat the fat. Drink the sweet. Send portions to people who have nothing prepared. Nobody is told to feel differently. They are told to do specific things.

You were never asked to produce a feeling, and the instruction that follows that verse has never once been about the inside of anybody. The Spirit of God is what makes joy a supply rather than a performance, and Nehemiah 8 is where the strength is written down.

Why a year went quiet

Now the practical half, and it is careful, because there are two versions of this and they need different things.

One version is ordinary. Life got busy and flat and the small pleasures stopped being noticed. Nothing is wrong, the machinery is fine, and a leaf on a windowsill reconnects it in about four seconds, which is what happened on Tuesday.

The other version is heavier. A year with nothing in it, where things that used to register do not, where it takes effort to get up and more effort to care, is worth saying out loud to a doctor. That is not an overreaction. That is what a doctor is for, and a man who has had a flat year should have somebody qualified know about it.

Only you know which one this is, and it may be both.

You are permitted to take this seriously without deciding tonight what it was, and a year that went quiet has never once been a thing you should carry without telling anybody. What is written in Nehemiah 8:10 puts the joy on God's side of the ledger, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stays with a man in either version.

And here is what Tuesday actually proved, which is the useful part.

It still works. Whatever went quiet in you is not broken, because a leaf got through it. That is not nothing. A year of flatness followed by an entirely disproportionate response to a plant is evidence that the apparatus is intact.

You have equipment that is still working, and one unexpected response to something small has never once been a poor kind of evidence. The Spirit of God is the one who reads that correctly, and Nehemiah 8 is the ground under it.

Go back and look

So here is the instruction and it is deliberately not ambitious.

Go back and look at it once more today.

Not to feel the same thing again. You probably will not, and chasing it would spoil it. Go back because it was the first good thing in a year and it is worth a second visit on those grounds alone.

Stand there for a minute. Let it be what it was on Tuesday. Do not audit it, do not measure it against what a year should have contained, and do not use it to start a project about being more present.

One minute. One leaf. The first in a year.

You are able to return to a good thing without needing it to perform again, and a second look has never once been an attempt to squeeze something. Nehemiah 8:10 says the joy of the LORD is your strength, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a man standing in front of a windowsill for the second time this week.