Composure Is Her Second Job

She noticed it in an elevator, alone, going down eleven floors. Her face was doing the thing. Nobody there. Doors closed. And her face was still arranged.

That was three weeks ago and she has not stopped noticing since. In the car with nobody in it. In her own kitchen at half past ten at night. In the bath.

She is thirty-nine. She is a good manager and people bring her difficult things and she is calm with all of them, and the calm is the reason they bring them, and she is proud of that and would not trade it.

But it started as work and it has become a resting state, and a resting state that costs energy is not a resting state, and she has been paying that bill since her twenties without ever seeing an invoice.

What frightens her slightly is that she cannot locate the off switch. It is not that she chooses to keep it on at home. It is that she has looked for the mechanism and cannot find it, which is a different and stranger problem.

Anybody whose composure became automatic knows this. And I want to say at the start: nobody in this article is going to be told she is fake. The calm is real and it does real good for real people. What has happened is that a genuine capacity has become an involuntary one, and involuntary is the word that matters here rather than dishonest.

Somebody else does the searching

Let me put down the two lines and notice who is doing the work in them.

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

Four imperatives and all four are addressed to God. Search, know, try, see. The psalmist is not examining himself. He is handing the examination over.

That is a specific relief for a woman who has been managing her own interior for twenty years. She has been the inspector and the inspected and the person maintaining the exterior while both of those happen, which is three jobs, and this verse quietly removes one of them.

You are searched by God rather than required to inspect yourself, and the psalm assigns all four verbs to Him. That is not a soft word for a woman in an elevator. It is what is written in Psalm 139, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and puts it into a living room at half past ten at night. The face is effort. The searching is God's.

And notice what the psalm assumes about being known. The whole of Psalm 139 is about God knowing a person completely, before words are on the tongue, in the womb, in the dark. And then at the end of all that knowing, the psalmist asks Him to search.

You have been fully known for the whole time the face has been up, and it never once obstructed anything. Psalm 139:1 says He has searched and known already, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that true in a woman who found her own face arranged in an empty elevator.

The calm is not a lie

Now the part this category exists for, and it goes ahead of everything.

Nobody is going to be told to be more real. That instruction is handed to composed people constantly and it is nearly always useless, because the composure is not a decision she is making that she could unmake this evening. It is automatic. Telling somebody to stop an automatic thing is like telling them to stop hearing.

And the second thing, which matters: her ache is not smaller because she is doing well. She is doing well. She is good at her work and people are better off for her. None of that reduces the cost of a face held for twenty years, and anybody who suggests otherwise is doing arithmetic on somebody else's interior.

What I want to name is what the composure has been protecting, because I think it has never been said to her. It has not been protecting her image. It has been protecting other people from having to handle her, and she learned early that this was the price of being welcome, and it has run automatically ever since.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart.Psalm 34:18

Nigh unto. There is no requirement in that verse that a person be able to show it to anybody first.

You were near to God through every hour the face was up, and He never once needed to see it come down. Psalm 34:18 is the written word for it, and it is His Spirit who lets a composed person be close without having to perform an unravelling.

You are held right now, in this room, with the face doing what it does even with nobody here. It is written that a person may hand the searching to God and ask to be led in the way everlasting, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in a woman who cannot find the off switch.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about the elevator rather than a manageable version. A composure this automatic is worth a real conversation with somebody trained, and being searched by God has never been a reason to skip one.