The Laughing Came First

Ruby knew from the sound of the car door.

That is a thing people who have been through a long bad year will understand and other people will not. She had spent fourteen months learning the difference between how a person shuts a car door when the news is bad and how they shut it when it is not, and she was in the kitchen with her hands in the sink and she heard it and she knew before anybody had come up the path.

Her boy is thirty-one. He had been ill in the way that goes on and on and does not resolve, with two false dawns in it, which is worse than none.

And she stood there at that sink with the water going cold round her wrists, and here is the thing, and it is the thing this article is about.

She did not know what to do.

Fourteen months of bracing had built her a whole set of responses for the other kind of news. She had a thing she did with her face. She had a plan for the first hour. She knew who she would ring and in what order and what she would say and how she would get off the phone.

For this, she had nothing at all.

He came in. He said it. And Ruby stood in her own kitchen with a dish towel and could not produce a single appropriate thing to do or say, and what came out of her instead, after about four seconds of complete blankness, was a laugh.

Not a nice laugh. A loud, ugly, undignified bark of a laugh, and then another one, and then she had to sit down on a kitchen chair, and her son stood there in his coat laughing too, and neither of them said anything sensible for about two minutes.

Her sister came round that evening and Ruby said, "I didn't know what to do with it."

Her sister said, "You laughed."

Ruby said, "That's not doing anything."

And her sister, who is eighty and has buried a husband and a daughter, said: "Ruby. That was the first thing you said to God about it, whether you meant it or not."

You may have forgotten too. If the news has been bad for long enough, a person builds equipment for bad news and stops maintaining any for the other kind, and when a good thing finally arrives there is a strange blank second where you genuinely do not know what you are supposed to do. And nobody has told you that what came out of you in that blank second already counted.

The Psalm Where Laughing Is The Response

There is a short psalm about a group of people who got something back that they had stopped expecting, and the thing it reaches for first is not a word.

"Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing... The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad."Psalm 126:2-3

The mouth gets filled with laughter and then the tongue gets the singing, in that order, and only after both of those does the sentence with God's name in it arrive.

That is not a psalm about doing thanksgiving correctly. It is a psalm about a body reacting before a mind has organized anything, and then the mind catching up and naming who it was.

You have a response in you that arrives before your manners do, and Scripture treats it as the beginning of the conversation rather than as a distraction from it. Psalm 126 puts the laughter first and the naming second without one bit of embarrassment about the order, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient homecoming song and puts it down in a kitchen with a dish towel in it.

And that is the whole grammar of the first, which this site keeps returning to. The first is what comes before the others. It is not required to be polished, and it is not required to be words. It only has to be first.

You were not being sloppy when the laugh got there before the sentence. That is what the written word does with joy again and again, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that land as permission rather than as an interesting observation about Hebrew poetry.

Nothing Is Required Of You To Be Glad

Now the plain part, said the way it would get said at a kitchen table.

There is a habit that grows in people who have had a long run of hard, and it is this. When something good finally comes, part of them starts working out the price of it immediately. What will this cost. What is going to be taken back. What am I now going to owe for having had this.

That is not a spiritual failing. It is what happens to a nervous system that has been braced for fourteen months, and it deserves gentleness rather than a rebuke.

But hear it plainly: there is no invoice attached to a good day. Not on this page, not from this site, and not from God. Ruby's boy coming home was not an advance against anything. Nothing was being lent to her that she now has to pay back in behavior or in gratitude or in anything else.

You have received a good thing and nothing is being recovered from you for it. It is written that every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, in whom there is no variableness, which is a sentence about a giver who does not take things back to balance a book, and His Spirit is the one who is doing the settling in your chest while you read that.

And say the guard clearly. Nothing on this page is a requirement. There is no thanksgiving you owe, no words that must be said, no proportion of any kind, and nothing routed to any person or work anywhere at all. If you never say a formal thing about this to God, you are exactly as much His tonight, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from turning into a debt that arrived dressed as a blessing.