I Cried in the Car Before I Came In

Tonight we are making bean and cheese quesadillas in a dry skillet, and they take about four minutes each.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Warm a dry pan over medium heat, no oil needed. Lay a tortilla in it, spread a few spoons of canned refried beans or mashed black beans over half of it, put a good handful of grated cheese on top of that, and fold the other half over. Press it down. Two minutes on that side, then flip it and give it two more, until the outside has brown blisters and the cheese has gone completely soft inside. Slide it onto a board and cut it into wedges with whatever knife is nearest. Do the next one while people eat the first. Hot sauce, or a spoon of salsa, or a little sour cream if there is any. It feeds four, it costs a few dollars, and children will eat it without any negotiation at all.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the quesadillas.

It is the five minutes in the driveway.

You pulled in and you did not get out. You sat there with the engine off and you cried, properly, the way a person does when they have been holding it since about eleven in the morning. And then you looked in the mirror and you fixed your face and you picked up your bag, and you walked in and said hello in a normal voice.

And now you are in the kitchen making dinner as though the last twenty minutes did not happen, and nobody in the house knows, and there is a specific loneliness in that which is worse than the crying was.

The verse where God keeps a record of exactly this

There is an image in Psalm 56 that is one of the tenderest in the whole book.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

The word tellest means counted. He counts the wandering. And then the image goes further than most people notice: tears collected and kept, and a book with them written in it.

That is not a general statement about God caring. It is specific and it is physical. Somebody cried, alone, where nobody saw, and the psalm says heaven collected it deliberately, like a person saving something valuable, and then wrote it down as well in case the bottle was not clear enough.

You were seen in that car, and God has never once let a private crying fall on the floor. Psalm 56:8 has tears gathered into a bottle and entered in a book, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an image like that arrive in a driveway rather than staying on a page.

You have not been crying alone, and heaven did not miss a single one of those five minutes. It is written that He counts the wanderings and keeps the tears, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the kitchen where the pan is heating.

The fixing of the face

Now let me talk about the mirror, because that is the part I want to handle gently.

Fixing your face before you walk in is not dishonesty. It is a real skill and it is often the right call. Children do not always need to carry an adult's day, and there are hours when the most loving thing in a house is a steady voice, and you provided one.

But there is a cost, and it is this. When nobody is told anything at all, the day disappears. It happened, and it was hard, and by seven in the evening there is no record of it anywhere except inside one person, and a thing that only lives inside one person gets heavier every hour it stays there.

A hard day that nobody was told about is not a verdict on how strong you are. It is a day that has not yet been put anywhere.

You are permitted to have had a bad day out loud, and God has never once required a woman to be the only witness to her own life. The passage has God Himself keeping the record rather than leaving it with the person who cried, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a day off a woman's chest and gives it a place.

You have been holding it steady for everybody since eleven this morning, and nobody has noticed because you are good at it. Psalm 56 was written by a man who was frightened and said so plainly in writing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes plainness possible in a room where everybody expects steadiness.

Say six words and no more

Here is the practical part, and I have deliberately made it small.

I am not asking you to explain. Explaining is exhausting and it would require you to relive the whole day standing at a stove, and it would probably start the crying again, and that has already happened once today.

Say six words. Today was hard. I am okay.

That is all. No detail, no story, no request. It puts the day somewhere outside your own head, which is the only thing that actually lightens it, and it does not cost you the composure you worked to get in that mirror.

And if somebody asks what happened, you are allowed to say: I do not want to go through it, I just did not want to be the only one who knew.

You are able to hand this over in one sentence, and God has never once needed a full account before He would lift a weight. Psalm 56:8 has tears kept without requiring an explanation of what caused them, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes six words in a kitchen do what an hour of explaining could not.