The One You Never Mention

There is a woman in Marcia's life whose whole direction changed in a conversation the two of them had in a car park in 2009, and Marcia has never told anybody about it.

Not once. Not in sixteen years. Not to her husband, not to the two women she tells everything to, and not on any of the evenings when she has sat in her own kitchen wondering whether she has ever been anything to anybody except slightly too much.

The other woman knows. They are still in touch. She mentioned it at a birthday four years ago, briefly, warmly, in front of about six people, and Marcia changed the subject so fast that one of them laughed.

She has thought about that quite a lot since.

Because the honest question is not why she is modest about it. It is why she cannot let it into the room where the doubt lives.

She has a lifetime of evidence that she is too much. Sighs, changed subjects, the eleven or twelve moments over thirty years that she can still quote verbatim. That evidence is all in the room with her, permanently, on file.

And the car park in 2009 is not in the room. It is kept somewhere else entirely, and it is never introduced to any of the rest of it, and she has never once wondered why the filing is arranged that way.

You have your own version. There is a thing that actually happened, and you never mention it, and you have never asked yourself why you keep it in a different drawer from everything you believe about yourself.

Nobody here is going to tell you to start telling that story. There is a version of this that turns a person into somebody who produces their one anecdote, and that is a worse thing to be than quiet.

But the drawer is worth opening, because of what is in the other one.

Paul names people as his joy and does it out loud

There is a sentence in Thessalonians where Paul says something about people that most of us would find embarrassing to say.

For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Are not even ye in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming?1 Thessalonians 2:19

He is asking them a question whose answer is: you are.

Not the work. Not the churches as an achievement, not the miles or the letters. The people, named as his joy, in writing, to their faces, without any apparent worry that it sounds like he is taking credit.

And notice where he locates it. In the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming. He is not saying they are his trophy now. He is saying that when everything is finally seen, they will be there, and their being there is the thing he is glad about.

That is a man holding a real outcome without turning it into currency, and it is exactly the thing Marcia has never been able to work out how to do.

And you are allowed to be glad about a person. That is not my permission: the written word has Paul naming people as his joy out loud and in a letter, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who has changed the subject at a birthday.

And the gladness is not a claim on the credit. The word puts the whole thing at His coming and in His presence, which locates the accounting somewhere other than in the room, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hold a real memory without it becoming something they are asserting.

Why the drawer is separate, and what it costs

Here is the part worth being precise about.

The evidence that she is too much is admissible in Marcia's court. It gets entered automatically, without her doing anything, and it has been accumulating for thirty years.

The car park is not admissible, and she is the one who ruled it out.

The reasons are decent ones. It feels like boasting. It was mostly not her; the other woman would tell it differently and there were four other people involved over the following year. It is not hers to tell. All of that is true, and every one of those reasons is also doing a second job, which is keeping the one piece of counter-evidence out of the trial.

And so a woman with a genuine outcome in her history sits in her kitchen on a Tuesday with a completely one-sided file in front of her, and concludes what anybody would conclude from a one-sided file.

And you are not too much. The word says we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God hath before ordained, and before ordained means the works were prepared for you rather than extracted from you, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are.

And the whole file is His to read. The word says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and not unrighteous to forget puts remembering on the side of His justice, which means nothing has been ruled inadmissible by the only court that matters.

Nobody is telling you to tell the story

I want to be plain, because this is where a message like this creates somebody insufferable.

Do not start telling it. Not at the next birthday and not as a habit. A person who deploys their one story is not free, they are defending themselves with an anecdote, and everybody can feel the difference.

And do not go back to the other woman to check the details, which is a way of asking to be told it again, and she will hear the ask underneath it.

What is available is entirely private and it is this: the next time the file comes out on a Tuesday evening, the car park is admissible. That is all. It does not get told to anybody. It simply stops being kept in a different drawer from the sighs.

And you are not required to prove your worth from your results. Nothing in Scripture makes a person's standing depend on their outcomes, and the Spirit of God has never once weighed anybody by what came of them.