Her Fortieth at the Bar

The invitation has been on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a lemon since the beginning of the month, and every time Priya opens the fridge it is there at eye level, which she now understands is a design flaw in where she put it.

Kemi is forty on the sixth. Kemi has been her closest friend since they were nineteen and shared a bathroom with a window that would not shut. Kemi sat in a hospital corridor with her for six hours once and never told anybody. There is nobody Priya would rather celebrate.

It is at a bar. Upstairs at a bar, in a room they have hired, with a tab behind it that Kemi's brother is running, and it starts at eight.

And Priya has been carrying this since the third of the month, and what she is carrying is not a simple thing. It is two true things at once. She wants to be there. She would be devastated not to be there, and Kemi would be hurt, and she is not going to do that. And she is afraid of that room in a way that has been sitting in her stomach for three weeks and has started waking her up.

She has thought about telling Kemi. She has drafted the message four times. She has not sent it, and she is not sure why, and the not being sure is its own small weight.

The sixth is Saturday.

You know that invitation. It might be a birthday, a leaving do, a reception. And the hard part is not that you do not want to go. The hard part is that you do want to go, badly, for a person you love, and the room the love has been scheduled into is a room you are frightened of.

You are not being sent in to fight anything, and you were never given that room as an assignment to win. Jehoshaphat was told ye shall not need to fight in this battle, set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the Lord, and the going was still required of him; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that difference clear to a woman looking at a magnet shaped like a lemon.

Ye shall not need to fight in this battle

Let me name the actual difficulty, because it is not fear on its own.

It is love and fear pointing at the same evening. If you only felt fear you would decline and be done. If you only felt love you would go and not think about it. What you have is both, at full strength, aimed at one date, and that combination does not resolve, it just runs, and it has been running since the third.

So let me take you to a king with an army coming and no plan at all.

Ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the Lord with you, O Judah and Jerusalem: fear not, nor be dismayed; to morrow go out against them: for the Lord will be with you.2 Chronicles 20:17

Read the instructions carefully, because there are four of them and only one of them is about the enemy.

Set yourselves: take your position. Stand still: do not run at it and do not run away. See the salvation of the Lord: watch what God does. And then, tomorrow, go out. He is still told to go out. The fighting is taken off him. The going is not.

You are being asked for the going and you were never assigned the fighting, and those two have been fused together in your stomach for three weeks. That is what stands written in 2 Chronicles 20, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates them again for a woman who has drafted the same message four times.

Now notice what Jehoshaphat had done just before. He stood in front of everybody and prayed one of the most honest prayers in the Bible: we have no might against this great company, neither know we what to do, but our eyes are upon thee. He did not manufacture confidence. He said the true thing out loud in public and then waited, and the answer came after the admitting and not before it.

You are permitted to say you do not know what to do, and you were never required to arrive at Saturday feeling capable. Scripture records the king saying neither know we what to do, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives that sentence as faith rather than as failure.

And here is the part that changes how the evening is walked into. When they went out the next morning, Jehoshaphat put singers at the front. Not soldiers. Singers, ahead of the army, and the text says that when they began to sing, the Lord set ambushments. The praise was not a reward for the victory. It went first.

You are able to go in praising rather than bracing, and you were never told the gladness had to wait until afterward. The written word puts the singers in front of the army, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman walk up a flight of stairs into a hired room genuinely glad for her friend.

And the plain things, which this site says every time. You owe nobody in that room an explanation. If you want to tell Kemi, tell her, and if you do not, that is entirely yours. Get there and get home however you need to, and the friend who knows, the counselor, the doctor, the room with the circle of chairs, all of it is God's kindness with a face on it. And you can leave whenever you like. Leaving at half past nine is not a failure. Being there at all is the gift.