Rend Your Heart And Not Your Garments

She cannot produce the emotion and she has decided that is the same as not being able to come back.

Here is what she believes it would have to look like. She has never described it to anybody but it is very detailed.

There would be weeping. Real weeping, the kind that takes you apart, proportionate to seventeen years. There would be a moment of enormous feeling in which the whole thing arrives at once.

And she has tried, twice, sitting in her car, to get to it deliberately.

Both times she got nothing. Not a flicker. She sat there dry eyed and slightly bored and profoundly embarrassed, and both times she concluded that she must not really want it, because if she wanted it she would feel it.

Now she does not try any more, because failing at it twice was worse than not attempting it.

She is forty-nine. She is a warm and expressive woman about everything else in her life, and she has come to believe that the flatness in this one area is a verdict about her sincerity.

So let me ask you.

What performance have you been unable to give?

He tells them to stop tearing their clothes

Joel is calling a whole people back, and in the middle of it he says something about the mechanics of it that is directly aimed at you.

In that world, tearing your clothes was the standard visible sign of grief. It was what you did so that everybody, including yourself, could see that you meant it.

And here is what the prophet says about that.

Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.Joel 2:13

Not your garments.

He is not asking for more feeling. He is removing the requirement for the visible display, and he is doing it in the same breath as the instruction to return.

Joel 2 takes the outward performance off the table as part of the very sentence that calls people back, and the Spirit who gave that word put the heart in place of the garments, so the weeping you could not produce in a car has never once been what any of this required. You are not short of one thing He asked for.

Now, darling, listen carefully, because there is something precise here.

He does say rend your heart. Something is asked. This is not an article telling you nothing is required.

But a torn heart is not a performance and it does not have a visible form, and crucially, you do not manufacture it by sitting in a car trying. You could not verify it in the mirror if you wanted to.

Joel 2 asks for the interior thing while explicitly refusing the exterior sign of it, and the Spirit was in that refusal, which means two dry-eyed attempts in a parked car proved nothing at all about your sincerity. You are sincere, and you have been sincere the whole time.

And read what he gives as the reason, because the reason is about Him and not about you.

For he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. The grounds for returning are His character. Not the quality of your remorse, not the volume of it, not whether it moved anybody.

Joel 2 puts the reason for the return entirely on God's disposition rather than on the returner's emotional state, and the Spirit was in that grounding, so arriving flat has never once been arriving insincerely. You are welcome cold.