When Feeling Goes Quiet: The Mercy of Numbness

There are seasons when the color drains out of everything. You are not sad, exactly — you are not much of anything at all. Food loses its taste. Music that once undid you now slides past without touching a thing. You reach for the people you love and cannot feel them; you go to the God who once brought you to tears and find only a great, level grayness where your heart used to be. And quietly, you begin to grieve — and to fear — that some living thing inside you has died.

Nothing has died. This is not emptiness, and it is not the end of your heart. It is shelter.

When feeling all of it would simply be too much — more than the whole system could hold and still stay standing — the house lovingly dims its own lights. Numbness is not the absence of a heart; it is a heart the mind has wrapped, so carefully, in soft cloth, to keep it from shattering while the storm passes over. This is the very mercy that once kept a child alive who could not have survived feeling the full weight of what was being done to her. It is an old and faithful hand, still doing the tender work it learned so long

ago.

He restoreth my soul. — Psalm 23:3

Restoreth. The color has not been taken from you — it is only being kept, in trust, until you are strong enough to hold it again. And feeling will return the way morning always returns: not because you forced the dawn, but because you were carried, through the dark, gently toward it.

Rest Here.