He Still Rejoices Over You

The moment happens in a car park, which is where most of the real ones happen.

She is fifty-three. She has been in the same church for twenty-two years and on the pastoral team for nine, and she is very good at it, and the thing she is best at is the visit nobody else wants to do. The angry ones. The ones where the person is not going to be nice.

A woman she has been visiting for four months has just told her, at the door, in a flat voice, that she does not want her to come any more.

And in the car afterward, she does not cry. She sits with her hands on the wheel and thinks, with a kind of tired clarity: that is fine. That is what I am for.

And then, riding in on the back of it, the sentence she has actually been living in for about five years arrives in full for the first time. It goes: God is faithful to me. He is not glad about me.

She would not preach that. She knows the verses. If you handed her a Bible she could take you to six places in ten minutes.

But underneath, in the place where a person's real theology lives, she has quietly reclassified herself. She is not one of the ones He delights in. She is one of the ones He keeps His word to. And there is a strange comfort in it, because it lowers the bar to something she can still clear on a bad week.

The word He picks

There is a line in Isaiah where God reaches for a comparison to describe how He feels about His people, and He could have reached for anything.

He could have said as a keeper guards a vineyard. He could have said as a shepherd counts the flock. Both would be true and both would be duty. He does not say either.

as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.Isaiah 62:5

A bridegroom. On the day. Rejoicing.

That is not the face of a man discharging a commitment. Nobody has ever described a groom at the top of an aisle as being faithful to his obligations. The whole point of the image is that it is the least dutiful moment available in human life, and God chose it deliberately over every steadier one He could have used.

You are the subject of a sentence God built out of gladness on purpose, and He passed over every dutiful comparison to get to it. That is not me warming up a text to be kind to you; it is the specific image the written word settles on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient wedding line and puts it in a car park with a woman's hands still on the wheel.

Why the downgrade felt like humility

Now let me name what the reclassification is actually doing, because I do not think you have seen it.

It feels like humility. It has the shape of humility. Lowering yourself from delight to duty sounds like a modest thing to do, and it comes with that strange relief you noticed, because an obligation can be met by a tired woman on a bad week and a delight seems to require something you have not got.

But look at what it costs. If God is only faithful to you, then every dry season is Him keeping His word through gritted teeth. Every prayer is a call He takes because He said He would. And a person cannot love a God like that. They can serve Him. They can be very good at the visits nobody wants. They cannot love Him, because you do not fall in love with someone who is tolerating you well.

You have not been humble for five years, you have been misinformed, and the two feel identical from the inside. Scripture says He rejoices over His people with singing and does not hedge the word, and the Holy Spirit does not carry a God who is merely putting up with the person He is in.

And I want to say something about the doorstep, because you will take that home tonight whatever else happens. A woman told you not to come back and you went to the car and told yourself that is what you are for. It is not what you are for. It is something you do, and you do it well, and it costs you. Being useful is not the same as being wanted, and you have been living off the first because you stopped believing the second.

You are wanted, and the wanting came first and has never once been performance related. The word of God says He loved first and that everything in us is a reply to it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that true through five years of a woman quietly filing herself under duty.