Part Two: The Numb Woman
Yesterday we spent time with the woman whose grief slowly tightened into bitterness, the woman so many of us recognize more easily than we would like to admit.
Today I want you to meet the second of these three women, because she came out of the very same valley by a far quieter road, and I have come to believe that her road can be every bit as perilous, precisely because it wears the appearance of peace.
She is the numb woman.
If you were to pass her in the grocery store or sit beside her in a pew, you would most likely notice nothing at all amiss, for she is faithful in a hundred small and unglamorous ways.
The meals are still prepared, the children are still delivered to where they need to be, the laundry is folded and the lessons are taught and the prayers are said aloud at the supper table in a voice that sounds, to everyone listening, perfectly steady.
What no one can see is that somewhere within her, quietly and without any single moment she could point to, a light that once burned warmly has dimmed down to little more than smoke.
She did not choose this.
No woman ever sets out to lose her capacity to feel.
More often it happens to the tender ones, the women who loved deeply and grieved honestly and carried the sorrows of the people around them as though they were their own, until one season of loss followed another so closely that her heart, in its mercy and its weariness, simply learned to stop registering the blows.
Perhaps she walked through a grief so heavy that to feel the whole of it would have undone her, and so she felt only the edges of it and called that survival.
Perhaps she spent years caring for someone who could not thank her, pouring out until there was nothing left rising up to be poured.
Perhaps disappointment arrived so often and so predictably that hope began to feel foolish, and she quietly decided it was safer to expect nothing than to be wounded again by wanting something good.
However she arrived there, the symptoms are gentle and easy to miss.
She reads the Scriptures she has loved her whole life and the words lie flat upon the page.
She sings the old hymns and hears her own voice as though it belonged to someone standing a little distance away.
She is not angry with God, and that is part of what frightens her in the rare moments she is honest, because anger at least would mean she still felt something.
Instead there is only a great, level quiet, and into that quiet she begins to wonder whether the Lord has grown as silent toward her as she feels toward Him.
I want to say something tenderly to that woman, because the Bible never treats her with contempt.
When the prophet Elijah had come to the very end of himself, having won the greatest victory of his life only to be threatened and hunted the very next day, he did not rage and he did not weep.
He walked a day's journey into the wilderness, sat down beneath a juniper tree, and asked to die.
"It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers." (1 Kings 19:4)
Here was one of the great men of God, emptied so completely that death looked like relief, lying down in the dirt of the desert with nothing left to give.
Notice what the Lord did not do.
He did not scold His exhausted servant, and He did not deliver a lecture on all that Elijah ought to have been feeling.
He let him sleep.
Then an angel touched him and fed him, and let him sleep again, and fed him a second time, for the Lord understood what we so often forget, that "the journey is too great for thee." (1 Kings 19:7)
Only afterward, days later and gently, did God speak, and even then He came not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in "a still small voice." (1 Kings 19:12)
I find more comfort in that account than I know how to express, because it tells me that the God we serve is not impatient with the weary.
He is not standing over the numb woman with His arms crossed, waiting for her to feel the right things before He will draw near, for He knows the difference between a rebellious heart and a tired one.
The prophet Isaiah promised that the coming Saviour would deal tenderly with worn-out people, that "a bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench." (Isaiah 42:3)
A reed already bent He will not snap in two, and a wick burned down to a thread of smoke He will not pinch out.
He bends low instead, and cups His hand around that last faint glow, and breathes.
If today you are the numb woman, hear this plainly.
The absence of feeling is not the absence of God.
Your faith was never the thing holding Him up; He has been holding you the whole time, even through the long stretch when you could not feel His hand at all.
The psalmist knew this strange country well, and he learned to speak to his own silent heart the way one might speak gently to a child needing to be reminded of what was still true:
"Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him." (Psalm 42:11)
Notice that he does not wait until the feeling returns before he begins to hope.
He hopes first, on purpose, while the heart is still quiet, trusting that the praise will come in its own time.
Healing for this woman rarely arrives as a sudden flood of emotion, and she must not measure the nearness of God by how much she happens to feel.
It comes the way life returned to the valley of dry bones, slowly and from the outside in, as the breath of God moves over what looked completely beyond reviving and asks the only question that has ever mattered, "can these bones live?" (Ezekiel 37:3)
The answer was never up to the bones.
It was always up to the One doing the breathing.
So if your heart has gone quiet, do not be afraid of the quiet, and do not despise yourself for being tired.
Bring the numbness itself to God, exactly as it is, with no performance and no pretending, and let Him do the slow and gentle work of waking what has gone to sleep.
"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." (Psalm 34:18)
He is nearest, it turns out, in the very season you were most afraid He had gone.
The smoking flax is not the end of the fire.
In the hands of God it is only the place where He stoops down to breathe it back to flame.
Biblical Womanhood
Stay tuned for the third and final installment in this series:
Part Three: The Faithful Woman
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