The Adrenaline Has Worn Off

Tonight we are taking a can of soup and turning it into an actual dinner, and it takes about twelve minutes.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Tip a can of whatever soup is in the house into a pot with whatever liquid it asks for. While it warms, add a handful of rice, either raw if you are willing to give it twenty minutes, or leftover cooked rice if there is some, which makes it eight. Salt it, because canned soup is usually underseasoned in one direction and oversalted in another and the fix is almost always more salt and something sharp. Let it thicken. Off the heat, stir in a big handful of grated cheese until it melts, and put in a splash of vinegar or a squeeze of lemon at the very end. Black pepper. Bread on the side if there is bread. It feeds three, it costs almost nothing, and the rice and the cheese are what turn it from a snack into a meal.

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

It is that somebody reading this has just stopped.

For weeks, maybe months, you ran on urgency. There was a thing that had to be got through, and you got through it, and something in you produced the fuel for that day after day without being asked. And now the thing is over, or handled, or at least no longer on fire.

And instead of relief, there is nothing. Flat, gray, no appetite, no interest, no energy for the smallest task. And the confusing part is that this is worse than the crisis was, and you cannot explain that to anybody, because from the outside it looks like everything is fine now.

The prophet who collapsed the day after the victory

There is a story in First Kings that is one of the most honest things in Scripture about exactly this.

But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die. (1 Kings 19:4, King James Version)

The timing is the point. This is the day after the greatest public victory of his life. Elijah had just seen fire fall on Carmel. He had outrun a chariot. And the very next thing that happens in the text is a man sitting down under a tree in the desert asking to die.

And here is what God does about it. No rebuke. No sermon. He sends food and He lets him sleep, and then He sends food again and lets him sleep again, and only after all of that does anybody say anything about what happens next.

You are in the place the prophet was in, and God has never once treated the collapse after a long push as a failure of nerve. First Kings 19:4 puts the lowest hour immediately after the highest one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person read that as a description rather than as a warning.

You have not fallen out of anything, and heaven has never once been surprised by what comes after a person stops running. It is written that he sat down under a tree and asked to die, and that God fed him twice before He said one word about the future, and the same Spirit who preserved that account is standing in the room where the soup is warming.

What the flat place actually is

Let me name what is happening, because knowing it helps more than most things.

While the crisis ran, your body was producing something to get you through it. That is real chemistry and it is not a metaphor. It borrows against the future to buy you the present, and it works, and it is one of the more remarkable things about being alive.

And then the crisis ends and the account has to be settled. The flatness is not the arrival of a new problem. It is the bill for the last one, and the bill always comes after the emergency, which is why so many people fall apart the week everything gets better.

Flatness after a long push is not a verdict on the person going through it. It is the ordinary, physical, expected aftermath of having been carried by adrenaline, and it passes.

You are not backsliding, and God has never once mistaken an exhausted body for a cooling heart. The passage has the collapse arrive immediately after the victory and does not moralize about it once, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates the aftermath from a person's standing.

You have been running on something borrowed, and the flat place is what repayment feels like. First Kings 19 has God attend to sleep and food before anything else at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who orders a recovery in exactly that way.

Eat and sleep, in that order, and nothing else

Here is the practical part, and it is taken directly out of the chapter.

Eat. Then sleep. Then eat again. That is the whole prescription and it is God's own, and it is worth noticing what is not in it. No decisions. No review of what just happened. No plans for the next thing. No spiritual exercises. Nothing requiring capacity.

So tonight: a can of soup with rice and cheese in it. It has salt, warmth, starch and fat, and those four things are what a body in this state actually needs, and the whole thing costs twelve minutes and one pot.

And then, if it is at all possible, go to bed early. Not because rest will fix everything by morning, but because you are at the eating and sleeping stage, and the angel did not wake Elijah up to talk. He let him sleep and then made him eat again.

You are allowed to do nothing but eat and sleep for a few days, and God has never once required a person to process something before He would feed them. First Kings 19:4 begins a passage where food and rest come first and conversation comes last, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that order feel permitted rather than lazy.