Peace Or Numbness

He noticed at a leaving do that he was standing exactly where he always stands, and that he had chosen it without thinking, and that he liked it there.

Near the door. Half in the corridor. Close enough to be part of it and far enough out that nobody was going to start anything with him.

He has been doing this for a while now. Six years, maybe more. In both rooms.

And there was a time when standing there hurt. He can remember that quite clearly. There was a stretch of about three years where being at the edge was a wound he carried home every week, and he used to think about it in the car, and he used to want somebody to come over.

That has gone. Genuinely gone. He does not want anybody to come over any more. He is completely comfortable near the door.

And on the way home from the leaving do he asked himself, for the first time, whether that is a good thing.

Because two completely different things look identical from the outside, and from the inside they are not much easier to tell apart.

One of them is peace. A man stops needing a room to settle him and stands wherever he likes and it costs him nothing, and that is a real thing and some people get there and it is not a consolation prize.

The other is that something got tired of hurting and switched off, and the switching off feels exactly like peace for the first few years.

He said out loud, in the car: I honestly do not know which one I have got.

You know that door.

Maybe you have a spot too. Maybe you leave early now and it does not sting the way it used to, and you have called that maturity. Maybe you have stopped hoping for something and you cannot tell whether you laid it down or whether it fell out of your hand.

There is no failure in this and there is no diagnosis being handed out. Both of those things happen to good people and neither of them is a character flaw, and a person genuinely cannot always tell them apart from inside.

Hand the question over

Here is the end of a very long psalm about being known, and the last thing the man does is the useful thing.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.Psalm 139:23-24

He asks to be searched.

Note that he has spent the whole psalm establishing that God already knows everything about him. He is not providing information. He is asking for the results.

And notice what he does not do. He does not conduct the search himself. He does not sit in a car and try to determine his own interior condition by introspection, which is what you have been attempting on the way home from a leaving do.

You are searched by somebody who can tell the difference, and you do not have to diagnose yourself. That is what Psalm 139:23 does by handing the examination over rather than performing it (Psalm 139:23), and it is the Holy Spirit who searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:10), which is a faculty that can distinguish two things that look identical from where you are sitting.

Why you cannot tell from inside

Here is the practical reason, and it will save you some effort.

Introspection reads the surface. It can tell you what you feel and it is very poor at telling you why, and both peace and numbness present as an absence of pain, which is the same reading on the same instrument.

You could spend another six years on this and not get further. People do.

You have not been failing at self examination, and the instrument you were using cannot make this measurement. Scripture says the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart (Jeremiah 17:9-10), and read the answer to the question in that verse, which is not the person themselves, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that searching in a way no amount of thinking in a car has ever managed.

And this page is not going to decide it either

Let me be plain, because you may be waiting for a verdict.

Nothing here tells you which one you have got. I do not know and I would be inventing it, and a stranger diagnosing a man's interior life from an article is exactly the sort of thing that makes people worse.

And nothing here tells you to stop standing near the door, or to force yourself into the middle of either room, or to make yourself want something you do not currently want.

You are not being handed a verdict or an assignment, and nobody is telling you to move. The word says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind (Romans 14:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who does that persuading in a person, at His own pace, which may be slow and is not being hurried by anybody here.