Somebody Finally Said It And It Did Nothing

It happened in front of about sixty people and he has been quietly frightened by it ever since.

The man who said it is the one whose word counted. Everybody in that room would tell you so. He has been there forty years, he is loved, and if he says a thing about a person then that is what the room thinks about that person.

And at the end of something, at a microphone, he named him. Said his name out loud and said he was one of us, and said it warmly and specifically and at some length, and everybody clapped and a woman he does not know well squeezed his arm on the way past.

Nine years he had wanted that. He could not have told you he wanted it, but he had.

And it landed on nothing.

Not disappointment. Nothing worse than nothing. It was like being handed the thing you have been saving for and finding it weighs nothing in your hand.

He drove home and did the arithmetic and the arithmetic came out badly, because if that did not do it, then what does, and the answer he arrived at somewhere near the second roundabout was: perhaps nothing does, and perhaps I am the sort of person for whom this never resolves.

That is what has frightened him. Not the emptiness. The conclusion he drew from the emptiness.

You know that drive.

Maybe somebody finally said it to you. Maybe you got the invitation, or the role, or the sentence, and were shocked at how little it did. Maybe you have not had it yet and you are reading this thinking that you would take it anyway, which is fair and is not being argued with.

Nothing went wrong that night. The man meant every word. The room meant the clapping. The failure was not in the delivery.

What is a rock and what is not

Here is a man in a psalm doing exactly the arithmetic you did on the way home, and reaching a different answer.

My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall not be moved.Psalm 62:5-6

He only. Twice, in two lines.

That word is doing all the work. It is not saying that other people are worthless or that a kind word from a good man means nothing. It is saying that only one thing in the arrangement is a rock, and everything else, however good, is not made of that material.

And look at what he does with his own expectation. He does not lower it. He relocates it. My expectation is from him.

You are held by a rock, and no person's word was ever built to carry that weight. That is what only means in Psalm 62:5-6, a statement about material rather than about worth (Psalm 62:5-6), and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness with our spirit about where we stand, which is the only channel there has ever been for the thing you were hoping to feel on that stage.

Why nothing happened, exactly

Now the mechanics, because there is a reason and it is not that you are broken.

A word from a person can tell you what that person thinks. That is the whole of what it can do, and it is genuinely valuable and it is not nothing.

What it cannot do is settle what you are. Nobody has ever been able to give that to anybody else, in any room, at any microphone, and if it had worked that night it would have worked temporarily, and you would have needed it again within about four months, and you would have needed it from him again specifically, and you would have organized your life around a man's continuing good opinion.

The emptiness in the car was not a malfunction. It was accurate.

You have not been given a fault to fix, and the nothing you felt was information rather than a verdict on you. Scripture says it is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in princes (Psalm 118:9), and it does not say princes are wicked, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between those two a felt thing rather than a proverb.

And nothing here is a word against that man

Let me be plain, because he deserves it.

Nothing on this page says he was wrong to say it or that his word is worth little. He said a true and generous thing in public about somebody who had earned it, and it took courage of a kind, and a great many people never do that for anybody.

Nothing here tells you to think less of him, or to withdraw from that room, or to stop caring what people you love think about you.

You are not being told to want less from people, and nobody in that room is being downgraded here. The word says charity rejoiceth in the truth (1 Corinthians 13:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person receive a kindness gladly without requiring it to be a foundation, which is a very different thing from becoming hard about compliments.