I Keep It And I Resent It

You keep it. That is the thing nobody knows about you.

Most of what gets written for people in bad houses assumes the house is not being kept. Yours is. You do it. Every day, more or less, you do the thing, and the house is functional, and nobody would look at it and think anything at all.

And you hate it.

Not the house. The doing. Every single minute of it, for years, with a quality of feeling that has started to frighten you a bit, because it seems disproportionate to a kitchen.

And you have never said it. Because what would you even say. I keep my house and I resent it. That sounds like ingratitude, or self pity, or the complaint of somebody with nothing real to complain about, and you have decided it is not sayable.

So you do it, and you hate it, and you say nothing, and the hating gets slowly heavier because nothing that is never said out loud ever gets lighter.

I am not able to bear all this people alone

There is a passage in Numbers where Moses says something to God that most people would not dare to say.

I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me. And if thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out of hand, if I have found favour in thy sight. (Numbers 11:14 and 15, King James Version)

That is in the Bible.

He is not being rebuked in that passage. Read what happens next. God does not correct him for the tone. He does not tell him to be grateful for the calling. He responds by distributing the load, practically, immediately, to seventy others.

The complaint was heard as information rather than as sin.

And notice what Moses did not do. He did not manage his feelings before speaking. He did not find a respectful way to phrase it. He said the raw thing, and the raw thing was taken seriously, and something changed as a result of it having been said.

You are not being ungrateful, and Numbers 11:14 has never once had a man rebuked for saying the load is too heavy. It is written as a raw complaint that was received and acted on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody say the true unmanaged thing.

You have been carrying a resentment that has never once been allowed out of your mouth. The word records the complaint and then records a response to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who hears a thing said badly and does not flinch.

Resenting it does not make you a fraud

Now let me say the thing I most want you to have, and it is about the relationship between feeling and action.

Nineteen years of doing the work while hating it is not hypocrisy. That is the highest form of faithfulness there is. A house is a record of what somebody has been carrying, and it is not a verdict on the woman carrying it.

Anybody can do a thing they enjoy. Doing a thing you hate, every day, for years, with nobody thanking you and nobody knowing what it costs, is a category of behavior that Scripture takes extremely seriously and that our culture cannot see at all, because our culture believes an action is only real if the feeling matches it.

The feeling does not have to match. It never has to match. A person who does the right thing while resenting it is not a fraud. They are somebody whose actions are not being governed by their feelings, which is the definition of character.

You were never being false, and there has never once been a requirement that a good action be accompanied by a good feeling. Numbers 11:14 has a man carrying a load and saying plainly that he cannot, and the Spirit of God is the one who honors an action that came out of a person who did not want to do it.

So tonight the resentment stays. I am not going to try to remove it, and you should be suspicious of anybody who tries.

You are permitted to hate every minute of it and do it anyway, and doing it that way has never once made it worth less. It is written that the complaint was received without rebuke, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in fifteen resented minutes.

Fifteen minutes, and say it out loud first

So here is the whole of it, and there is an extra step tonight and it is the important one.

Before you start, say out loud, to nobody: I hate doing this.

Say it plainly. Do not soften it. Do not add but I know I should be grateful.

Then set the timer for fifteen minutes and do it anyway.

You are permitted to say the raw unmanaged thing tonight, and no complaint in that passage was ever once corrected for its tone. Numbers 11:14 records a man saying the load is too heavy and being answered practically, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hears a thing said badly and does not flinch.

When the timer goes, stop.

The saying it out loud is not a complaint and it is not a tantrum. It is the thing Moses did, and the reason it matters is that a feeling that has been said is a feeling that stops growing in the dark.

You are able to say the true thing and do the right thing in the same evening, and there has never once been a rule that they cancel each other. Numbers 11:14 records both the saying and the continuing, and the Spirit of God is present in a sentence said to an empty kitchen and fifteen minutes done afterward.