Fine, Thanks, Good Weekend

Here is a sentence millions of people say on a Monday morning, and almost none of them mean.

Fine, thanks. Good weekend.

Picture the exchange. Two people meet at a coffee machine at ten past eight. One says, good weekend? The other says, yeah, good, thanks, you? And that is the whole thing. Four seconds. Both people move on.

Now picture what was actually behind it for one of them. She lost Sunday from about five o'clock. She snapped at her daughter over nothing at six thirty and has been quietly ashamed of it since. She lay awake from one until about three writing an email in her head that she is now going to send anyway, badly. She has felt this way most weeks for two years.

And the whole of that got compressed into the word good.

Now, some of that is just manners, and manners are not a sin. A coffee machine at ten past eight is not a confessional and nobody is asking it to be. That is not the problem.

The problem is what happens when it is the only setting a person has. When the true sentence has not been said to anybody, anywhere, in any room, for two years.

Because a thing that has never been said out loud gets bigger, not smaller. It stops being an experience and becomes a fact about you. And a fact about you cannot be argued with, because nobody else has ever seen it, so nobody has ever been able to say the obvious thing back.

Here is the obvious thing nobody has been able to say to her. Almost everyone at that coffee machine has a version of Sunday evening. She is standing in a room full of people carrying the same thing, and every single one of them said good.

The psalm gives an audience and a place

There is an instruction in the psalms about honesty that is far more specific than people remember.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. Selah. (Psalm 62:8, King James Version)

Pour out your heart. Not tidy it. Not summarize it. Pour it, which is what a person does with a jug, and what comes out of a jug is whatever was actually in it.

And notice the two things attached to the instruction. There is an audience, before him. And there is a reason it is safe, God is a refuge for us. The honesty is not sent out into the air. It has somewhere to land.

You are permitted to say the whole of it and not the edited version, and Psalm 62 makes pouring out the heart a command rather than a weakness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that possible for somebody who has been saying fine for two years.

The strangest thing about that verse is who it is addressed to. Ye people. Plural. It is not a special provision for the fragile. It is the normal instruction for everybody.

You have not been handed a special allowance for weak people, and the passage says ye people rather than singling anybody out (Psalm 62:8), and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a plural command and makes it feel like it has one specific person's name on it.

A woman who was misread, and what she said

There is a scene in the first book of Samuel that belongs here more than almost anything else in the Bible.

A woman is in the worst year of her life. She goes to the house of God and prays without making any sound, and her lips are moving, and the priest looks at her and concludes she is drunk and tells her off for it.

Read what she says back, because it is one of the great sentences.

And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD. (1 Samuel 1:15)

I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit. She does not perform. She does not say fine, thanks. She corrects a man to his face with the plain truth about her own condition, and the book records it approvingly.

You are allowed to answer with the actual state of things, and 1 Samuel 1 puts a woman's plain sentence about her own sorrow into Scripture without one word of correction attached to it, and the same Spirit who kept that line in the book is not embarrassed by anybody's Sunday.

And notice what she was doing when she was misread. Pouring out her soul. The very thing the psalm commands. She was obeying, and it looked to an observer like she was drunk.

You have been doing something right in a way nobody around you could read, and 1 Samuel 1:15 has that exact misunderstanding written down and preserved, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person steady when the room misreads them.

What this is not

Let me be careful here, because this could be turned into a burden very easily.

This is not saying that anybody owes their whole interior life to a coworker at a coffee machine. Discretion is not dishonesty. There are people at work it would be unwise to tell anything to, and knowing that is wisdom rather than fear.

It is also not promising that saying the true thing makes Sunday easier. It might not. What it does is end the arrangement where a person carries something alone that nobody has ever seen.

And plainly: if the true version includes not wanting to be here, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you wants it all to stop, do not put that into a coffee machine conversation. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say it out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. That is the right room for it, and going there is not a failure of faith.

You are not required to be honest with everybody in order to stop being alone with it, and Psalm 62 names one audience where the whole of it can be poured out (Psalm 62:8), and the Spirit of God is the one who also arranges the one human being who can hear it.