Twenty Minutes of Everyone Else

At eleven o'clock she was happy, and she would have said so if anybody had asked.

That is the detail worth holding onto, because it goes missing later. She had a good day. Not a remarkable one. She had walked to work in that cold bright weather that makes a person feel about nine years old, and a colleague had told her a story at lunch that was still funny six hours later, and she had made a decent dinner and eaten it at the table like a grown person instead of standing at the counter. She had one lamp on. There was a blanket over her knees. She was, in the plain unspectacular sense of the word, fine.

At eleven twenty she was not.

Nothing had happened in between. That is the part she cannot explain to herself, and she has tried, lying awake, on more than one Tuesday. Nobody called with bad news. Nothing broke. There had only been the twenty minutes, the ordinary and completely harmless twenty minutes of everybody else.

A kitchen somebody had finished. A photograph from a place with white buildings and a blue door. Somebody she went to school with holding a small baby and looking straight down at it with an expression that made her look at it twice. A friend of a friend who had started a thing and it had worked. Two people she barely knows on a beach, laughing, and the sea behind them the color you only get in the late afternoon.

Every one of those things was good. That is what makes the twenty minutes so hard to be angry at. There was nothing to be angry at. Everybody was just living, out loud, the way people do, and she was pleased for most of them and meant it at the time.

But at eleven twenty she put the phone face down on the cushion and looked around her own room, and the room had changed.

It had not, of course. The lamp was the same lamp. The blanket was the blanket her aunt made. The room was the room she had chosen and painted and been so pleased with. And it had all gone thin, the way a photograph goes thin when you hold it up to a window, and the thing she was fine with at eleven o'clock was suddenly a smaller life than the one she had thought she had.

She sat there in it. That is the specific flatness, and if you know it, you know there is no name for it and it does not have a shape you can argue with. She was not envious of anybody in particular. She could not even have picked one. It was more like the volume of her own life had been turned down four notches by somebody else's hand and she could not find the dial.

At twenty-five past she got up, put the cup in the sink, turned the lamp off, and went to bed feeling faintly ashamed of the whole thing, which she also could not have explained.

Somebody in Scripture Did This Exact Thing

Here is what I am not going to do with your evening, and I want to say it plainly so you can relax into the rest of the page.

I am not going to tell you the looking was the crime. Everybody gets handed that one, usually by somebody who means it kindly, and it never once helped, because it lands as a small shame on top of a flatness you were already carrying, and now you have two things instead of one.

And there is a better reason than kindness for refusing it. The looking is in the Bible. It is not in there as a warning story either. It is in there in the first person, written by a man whose actual job was leading a nation's worship, and he did not tidy it up before he wrote it down.

But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.Psalm 73:2-3

Read that again and notice that he is the one telling you. Asaph. A worship leader. He looked around at how well it was going for people who were not even trying to live well, and something in him slid sideways, and he says so, in a song, in the collection everybody sings from.

You are in extremely good company tonight, and you were never the first person in the house of God to look up at eleven twenty and go flat. Psalm 73 is written proof of that, kept on purpose in a book that could easily have left it out, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps a psalm about a slipping worship leader from ever being used as a stick to hit you with.

Now look at the verb tense in that verse, because it is doing something enormous and quiet. My feet were almost gone. My steps had well nigh slipped. Almost. Well nigh. Not gone. Not slipped. He is telling you from a standing position about a moment when he thought he was going over, and the fact that the sentence exists at all means he did not.

You have been standing this whole time, and the flatness at eleven twenty was never the sound of you falling. That is what the written word actually says about a man in this exact condition, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes the difference between almost and gone land somewhere below your ribs rather than staying a piece of grammar.

What Twenty Minutes Actually Does

Let me tell you what I think happened in that room, and it is not a moral failing.

Twenty minutes of everybody else does not give you new information about your life. It cannot. Not one fact about your day changed while you were looking. What it does is quietly swap out the thing you were measuring against. At eleven o'clock you were measuring your evening against your evening, and it was a good evening. At eleven twenty you were measuring it against forty different people's best four seconds, assembled, in order, with the light right.

No life survives that comparison. Not one of the lives you were looking at survives it either, including the beach and the blue door.

And here is what makes it so disorienting. You were not lied to. That kitchen is finished. That baby is real. Everybody was telling the truth. The flatness is not caused by falsehood, it is caused by arithmetic, and that is why you cannot argue your way out of it at midnight and why you should stop trying.

You are not being asked to win that comparison, and you were never entered in it. Psalm 73:16 says that when Asaph tried to reason his way through this, it was too painful for him, which is written permission to stop trying to think your way out at eleven twenty at night, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a person somewhere else instead of arguing with them.

Because that is what happens next in the psalm, and it is the hinge of the whole thing. He does not conclude anything. He does not talk himself around. He goes into the sanctuary of God, and everything looks different from in there, and then a few lines later he says the sentence that the rest of his life hangs on: nevertheless I am continually with thee; thou hast holden me by my right hand.

He did not stop looking and then get held. He was being held while he looked. He simply had not noticed, because he was busy doing arithmetic.

You have been held by the right hand the entire twenty minutes, and you were not put down for a second while you scrolled. Psalm 73:23 says thou hast holden me, in the perfect tense, an already accomplished grip, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a written grip feel like an actual hand on a Tuesday night.