Satisfied When I Awake

Dawn on the porch with a quilt over the rail because it was out there all night and neither of them thought to bring it in.

Two cups. Her friend has been staying four days and neither of them is talkative in the morning and both of them like that about the other.

She is seventy-three.

And here is a thing that has happened so gradually that she could not date it: nothing satisfies her.

Not in a dramatic way. She is not depressed and she is not bitter and she enjoys a great many things. The coffee is good. The light coming up over the far side is genuinely good. Her friend being here is good.

But there is a thing that used to happen at the end of a good thing, a settling, a sense of that was enough, and it has not happened in years. Everything is fine and nothing lands. She goes to bed at the end of a good day the same way she goes to bed at the end of a poor one, and the difference between them has become academic.

And she has stopped expecting it. That is the part she would confess if there were anywhere to confess it. She no longer waits for the settling, because waiting for a thing that does not come is exhausting and she is too sensible to keep doing it.

If nothing has landed for you in a long time, you know it is not sadness, and you know you have stopped mentioning good things because there is no point describing what did not arrive.

The psalm names what it is that satisfies

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the good things, which are still good and which you still notice. It is the landing. It costs you the end of every day, which used to have a settling in it and is now simply the end. It costs the difference between a good day and a poor one, which has become academic and which is a strange and lonely thing to lose. It costs you the expectation, which you gave up on sensible grounds. And it costs you the mentioning, because there is no way to describe an absence like that without it sounding like ingratitude.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if nothing landing has gone somewhere darker, tell one living person today. Your doctor, the friend who has been staying four days, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Nothing on this page is medical advice and nothing here would call getting help a lack of faith. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who stay four days and do not need conversation in the morning.

Now, Psalm 17, and read what David names as the thing that satisfies.

As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.Psalm 17:15

I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.

He does not name a thing. He does not say satisfied with rest, or with reward, or with the end of trouble, all of which he had ample reason to want and any of which would have been an ordinary way to finish that psalm.

He names a face. Thy likeness. The satisfaction he describes is a person seen, and he puts it at a waking.

You are being told what the satisfying thing is, and it turns out not to be a thing. Psalm 17:15 names the likeness of God as what satisfies, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old man's last line and lays it on a porch at dawn.

Now, why that matters to a woman for whom nothing lands. If satisfaction were a quantity of good things, then your problem would be a supply problem, and the answer would be more or better, and everybody who loves you would keep suggesting exactly that, and it would keep not working.

The psalm says the satisfying is a face. Which means what you have been unable to find in a supply of good mornings was never going to be there, and its absence is not a fault in your capacity to enjoy anything.

You have been looking in a category that was never going to hold it. That is written into Psalm 17:15, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes an unmet longing readable as a location rather than a failure.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because a lot of good and true things have been said on that porch over four days.

It does not promise you the settling back in this life. David puts it at a waking and he does not date it, and I am not going to date it either, or predict what your evenings feel like next year, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not make the satisfaction a reward. Nothing in that verse says it is given for having waited well or borne anything properly. It is not payment. Psalm 17:15 sets no standard you have failed and nothing to catch up on, and the Holy Spirit has never once carried a bill to anybody.

And it does not tell you to stop enjoying the coffee. The coffee is good. Enjoy the coffee.

You were never behind on anything in that verse. Scripture names a face rather than a supply, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries that onto a porch with a quilt left out all night.