I Went Back Once

It was a Thursday and it lasted about four hours and Danielle has thought about the hour afterwards more than the four.

Six years. She had six years. She had a card in her purse with a date on it and she had said her testimony out loud in a room of about forty people and meant every word of it.

And then a Thursday, for reasons that were partly a bad week and partly nothing at all, and by seven that evening it was done.

The four hours were not the worst part. She wants that said and I believe her.

The worst part was sitting on the end of her bed at about half nine, entirely sober, entirely clear headed, and doing the arithmetic. Because the arithmetic came out one way and she has never been able to make it come out any other.

If it can happen after six years, then nothing was ever put down. The six years were a gap. I was never a woman who had been delivered, I was a woman between episodes, and every single thing I said in that room was a lie I did not know I was telling.

That was four years ago. She has not gone back since. Four more years.

But she has never got back what she had before that Thursday, and it is not the sobriety, which she has. It is that she cannot believe her own burial any more. She stood in water once and something was put in the ground, and now she thinks the ground was never there.

You may know that end of the bed.

Maybe yours was one afternoon after a long time. Maybe it was a fortnight. Maybe it was years ago and you have never told anybody and you have been operating ever since on a conclusion you reached alone, sober, at half nine at night.

Nothing here is going to scold you

Let me be absolutely clear before anything else, because you have been braced since the title.

There is no reproach in this article. Not one sentence of it. You have done more of that to yourself in four years than any stranger could add to, and adding to it would be both cruel and useless.

I am not going to tell you the Thursday did not matter. It mattered. You know it mattered and pretending otherwise would insult your intelligence and everybody involved.

I am not going to tell you what to do about the practical side of it, because I do not know your life. If there are people who help you, stay near them. If there is somebody you could tell about the half nine conclusion, tell them, because a conclusion reached alone on the end of a bed has never once been improved by staying there. Find someone.

That is the whole of my advice and I am stopping there deliberately.

What I want to look at is the arithmetic.

The sentence said from the floor

There is a line in Micah, and the striking thing about it is who is speaking and where they are standing.

Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me.Micah 7:8

He is not saying I will not fall. He is saying when.

And he is saying it to somebody who is already celebrating, which means he is down at the time of speaking. This is not a sentence written in advance by a person doing well. It is what a man says while he is on the floor and somebody is enjoying it.

Look at what he refuses to concede. He does not argue that he did not fall. He concedes the fall entirely and disputes only what it means.

That is the whole fight, and it is exactly your fight, and you lost it at half nine on a Thursday four years ago because there was nobody there to tell you that the fall and its meaning are two different things.

And falling does not establish that nothing was ever put down. The written word has a man conceding the fall and disputing the conclusion in the same breath, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman sitting on the end of a bed.

And you were not a woman between episodes. The word says buried with him by baptism into death, and it describes something done rather than something maintained, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than auditing your record for gaps.

The word your testimony was not

Now let me deal with the thing that I suspect hurts most, because you used the word lie.

You said the testimony was a lie you did not know you were telling.

It was not a lie. A lie requires you to have known something else was true. What you said in that room was your honest account of what had happened to you at the time you said it, and the Thursday did not travel backwards and make you a liar in a room in front of forty people.

Something did happen to you. The Thursday does not have the power to un-happen it, and the arithmetic you did assumed it does.

And what you said in that room was true when you said it and is still true. The word says he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it, in a continuous tense that does not require an unbroken record, and the Spirit is the one who makes performing His work rather than yours.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has been prosecuting herself sober for four years.