Everybody Asked If She Had Misheard God

The fourth time was in a kitchen at a party, and the person asking was somebody she loves.

They said it the way all four of them have said it. Gently. With a hand on her arm. Something along the lines of: I just want to make sure you have really sat with whether this was God, because you have had such a hard year and nobody would think less of you.

And she said what she always says, which is that she has sat with it, and thank you, and she really appreciates them asking.

Then she went and found a bathroom and stood in it for two minutes.

Eight months.

It has been a rough eight months and she does not dispute that. It went wrong in ways she did not expect, twice, and there was a stretch in the winter that took something out of her that has not entirely come back yet.

But she knows what happened before she started, and that is the part nobody can get at, and it is also the part she has stopped trying to describe out loud, because describing it makes it sound smaller and less certain than it is, and she has heard herself do that twice and hated it both times.

The four askings have done something she did not expect. They have not made her doubt. They have made her tired, which is different and possibly worse, because doubt you can address and tiredness just accumulates.

She has started pre-answering. She goes into rooms with the response ready. She has a version of it that is warm and short and lets people off the hook, and she deploys it before anybody has even asked, which means she is now doing their work for them and paying for it herself.

And underneath that, in the bathroom at the party, a small clear sentence: I am the only one who was there, and I am the only one who is being asked to prove it.

And you are being asked too. Kindly, probably. By people who love you. And you have started carrying an answer around ready, and it is wearing you out.

He would not argue, and he said the one thing he knew

There is a man in John nine who has been given his sight, and the whole chapter after the miracle is an interrogation.

It goes on and on. They ask him. They ask his parents, who are frightened and deflect. They call him back and ask him again, and they tell him what conclusion he ought to be reaching, and they get progressively less kind about it.

And the man will not be drawn into a theological argument he is not equipped for. He says this.

He answered, "Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see."John 9:25

Look at how much he refuses to claim. He does not defend a doctrine. He does not answer the question they are actually pressing, and he says openly that there is something he does not know.

And then he plants one sentence and does not move off it.

You are not required to defend the whole of it, and you have never been required to, and the exhaustion of the last eight months has come mostly from trying. It is written, one thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see (John 9:25), and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person hold one clear sentence in a room full of questions without needing to win anything.

Now the asking itself, and let us be fair to the four of them.

They love you. Every one of those questions came from somebody watching you have a hard year and wanting to give you a way out, and that is not malice, it is care that has arrived in an awkward shape.

But care in an awkward shape still lands on somebody, and four times is four times, and you are allowed to notice that it costs you something without deciding that anybody meant harm.

You are allowed to be tired by kindness without owing anybody a defense of your tiredness. Scripture says a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver (Proverbs 25:11), which quietly tells us that timing and shape matter enormously, and it is His Spirit who lets a woman receive love that arrived clumsily without either resenting it or absorbing its verdict.

Now the pre-answering, because that is the actual injury.

You go into rooms with the response ready. That means the review has moved inside you, and it now runs whether or not anybody asks, which is the point at which four questions become a permanent condition.

You are free to walk into a room with nothing prepared, and you owe no one an explanation on arrival. It is written that it is a very small thing to be judged by any human court, and that the one who judges is the Lord (1 Corinthians 4:3-4), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that freeing rather than defiant, which is the whole difference between a woman at rest and a woman with her guard up.

And the hard year deserves the truth said about it.

Nobody here is going to tell you the eight months mean it was right, and nobody is going to tell you they mean it was wrong. The winter was hard. It took something. It has not entirely come back yet, and that is a real cost being carried by a real person, and it does not get promoted into evidence in either direction.

You are carrying a genuine cost, and it is not doubling as a verdict, and you may put down the second job it has been doing. Scripture says we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and it is His Spirit rather than the shape of a year who bears witness with your spirit about what is true.