I Cannot Remember Enjoying Them

Somebody asked you what your children are like and you gave a good answer about that one.

You said the right things. They were all true. You listed qualities and you meant every one of them.

And afterwards, walking to the car, you tried to remember the last time you actually enjoyed their company, and you could not find it, and the not finding it was quiet and it stayed with you for the rest of the day.

Not love. That is not in question and it never has been. Enjoyment, which is a different thing entirely and which nobody talks about, because saying you do not enjoy your own child sounds like the worst sentence a person could say.

I am not going to give you something to schedule. That is a method and this is not a place that hands those out, and an arranged afternoon with a purpose attached is the fastest way to make a bad hour worse.

And I am not going to tell you it will come back, because I do not know that, and I am not going to promise you anything about a person I have not met.

The LORD taketh pleasure in his people

There is a line in Psalm 149 that uses a word most people never associate with God at all.

For the LORD taketh pleasure in his people: he will beautify the meek with salvation. (Psalm 149:4, King James Version)

Taketh pleasure. Not tolerates. Not loves in spite of. Not commits to.

Pleasure is an enjoyment word, and it is being used about a group of people who, if you read the rest of the Psalms, were extremely hard work for extended periods.

You are taken pleasure in by God, and it has never once depended on you being enjoyable company that week. Psalm 149:4 says the LORD taketh pleasure in his people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a walk to the car after somebody asked a simple question.

And it is written in the present tense as a standing fact rather than as a reaction to a good season.

The people in that psalm did not earn the pleasure by being easy. It is described as a property of God rather than as a response to their behavior, which is why it holds through the chapters where they are impossible.

You are enjoyed as a standing fact rather than as a reaction, and no hard season has ever once interrupted it. It is written in Psalm 149:4 that the LORD taketh pleasure in his people, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps that as a property of Himself rather than as a report on anybody.

Enjoyment is a casualty, not a verdict

Now let me name what has actually happened, because the conclusion you drew on that walk was not the accurate one.

Enjoyment requires a small amount of spare capacity. Not much. A margin, somewhere, in which a person can be found funny rather than managed.

When every interaction with somebody is being handled, that margin closes. Not because the affection went, but because handling and enjoying use the same part of a person, and handling always wins because it is urgent.

You are not short of affection for that child, and a closed margin has never once been a shortage of love. It is written in Psalm 149:4 that the LORD takes pleasure in his people as a standing thing, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a missing margin apart from a missing heart.

So what you lost is not your feeling for that child. It is the margin, and it went quietly, and losing it is what happens to anybody in a long stretch of difficulty.

Psalm 149:4 keeps pleasure as a fact about God rather than as a measure of a relationship, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a casualty apart from a verdict.

You are not looking at the death of something, and a closed margin has never once been the same as a lost affection. Psalm 149:4 makes pleasure a standing fact rather than a reading, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names what actually went missing.

And here is the plain thing, because a walk to a car turned into something larger.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about what is between you and that child.

It is a person under a long load noticing an absence, and the noticing is a sign of care rather than of coldness.

You have not stopped caring about that child, and noticing an absence has never once been the same as causing it. The written word holds the pleasure steady in Psalm 149:4 regardless of the season, and the Spirit of God is the one who declines to read a quiet walk to a car as a finding.

He will beautify the meek

There is a second half to that verse and it is doing something specific.

He will beautify the meek with salvation. Beautify is a strange verb to find in a psalm, and it means to make something lovely that was not obviously lovely before.

That is not flattery. It is a description of an action performed on a person by somebody else, and the person being beautified does not do it to themselves.

You are being worked on by somebody with capacity you do not currently have, and none of it has ever waited for you to feel able. It is written in Psalm 149:4 that He will beautify the meek with salvation, and the Spirit of God is the one who adds what a worn out household cannot produce.

Which means the loveliness in a difficult stretch is not something anybody in the house has to generate. It is added, by God, to people who are described as meek, which in the Psalms mostly means worn down rather than gentle.

Psalm 149:4 has God adding what a household cannot produce, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that in the middle of a season rather than after it.

You are being made lovely by somebody else's action, and none of it has ever waited for a household to produce it. Psalm 149:4 says he will beautify the meek with salvation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who adds what nobody in the house has spare capacity to make.