Nothing Is Wrong And Nothing Is There

If somebody asked you what the problem is, you would not have an answer.

She is kind. She works hard. She has never once done anything to you. There is no debt, no crisis, no third party, no drinking, nothing you could write down on a piece of paper and hand to a counselor.

And you sat in the truck last Tuesday and tried to name one warm thing about your own marriage and could not do it in four minutes of trying.

That combination is a specific kind of lonely, and I think it is worse than a fight. A fight has a shape. A fight can be worked on. This has no edges at all.

And it has a second cruelty in it, which is that nobody will take it seriously. You cannot tell a friend that everything is fine and you feel nothing, because everything is fine is where the sentence stops for most people.

I am not going to tell you what caused it, because I do not know. I am not going to tell you it lifts, because I cannot promise that.

I am going to show you where the work is being done in a year like this one, because it is not being done anywhere you can see.

The renewal you cannot inspect

There is a sentence in second Corinthians written by a man who was having a genuinely terrible decade, and the structure of it is what I want.

though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16, King James Version)

Two things running at once, in opposite directions, in the same person.

The outward thing is visibly going down. He does not deny it, minimize it or spiritualize it. He says perish, which is not a gentle word.

And at the same time, on the inside, something is being renewed. Not restored at the end. Renewed day by day, during the perishing, while nothing on the outside improves.

You are being renewed somewhere you cannot inspect, and 2 Corinthians has never once made the visible half the reliable report. 2 Corinthians 4:16 has the inward renewal running underneath the outward decline, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact rather than a consolation.

Now put that beside your four minutes in the truck. You were inspecting the outward. Of course you were. It is the only part with a surface on it.

You have been reading the only half you can see, and the word has never once said that half was the whole account. The passage runs two things at once in the same man and calls only one of them visible, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells somebody the other one is running.

Why there is nothing to point at

Let me say something about the shape of this, because I think the shapelessness is half the weight.

Some marriages go flat because of an event. Those have a story and the story helps, even when the story is awful.

Some go flat with no event at all. Two people carry a decade of ordinary weight, a job, a parent dying, a child's hard year, and neither of them does one wrong thing, and the warmth goes down the way a battery goes down. Slowly, evenly, invisibly, and with nobody to blame.

You are living in the second kind and have been blaming yourself for the first, and 2 Corinthians has never once required an event to explain a flat year. 2 Corinthians 4:16 admits the outward perishing plainly and runs the renewal underneath it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a man there is nothing to confess here.

That second kind is not a lesser problem. It is a harder one, because there is nothing to repair. There is only something to keep.

And keeping, it turns out, is a thing a person can actually do without any warmth whatsoever.

You are able to keep something with an empty tank, and it has never once been the warmth that was doing the holding. 2 Corinthians 4:16 keeps the renewal going while the visible part gives out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at work in a man who cannot find a warm thing to name.

You were promising to be present, and nobody has ever once been able to promise a feeling and keep it. It is written that the inward man is renewed day by day, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the renewing in a year with no evidence in it.

Say it, then do a plain thing

Here is the assignment, and it is small, and small is what actually gets done in a flat year.

Say out loud, alone, in the truck or in the kitchen: the promise is not the feeling. What I promised was presence, and I am present.

Say it once. It will sound stupid. Say it anyway.

You are able to say it badly and have it count, and the word has never once graded a sentence said by a man with an empty tank. 2 Corinthians 4:16 keeps the renewing going while nothing visible improves, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in a truck at seven in the morning.

Then do one ordinary thing for her. Not a gesture, not a surprise, nothing that would start a conversation. Fill her car. Fix the drawer. Deal with the thing she has been putting off calling about.

Small enough that she does not ask what it is about. If she asks, it was too big.

You are able to act with nothing behind it, and an action has never once required a feeling to go in front of it. 2 Corinthians 4:16 renews the inward man during the outward failing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a man fixing a drawer on a Saturday morning.

And do not check afterward to see whether it did anything. That is the four minutes in the truck again, in a different coat.