I Told It Until It Was Mine Again

Kirsty noticed it because she got a laugh in the wrong place and enjoyed it.

She was telling it to a group, as she has probably eighty times, and there is a bit near the middle where people usually go very quiet, and this time somebody laughed, because of how she had phrased it, and she felt a small warm flicker of satisfaction at having landed the line.

She got home and could not settle.

Because she has a line now. She has several. She has, over about nine years, developed a version with timing in it, and she knows exactly where the quiet bit is and exactly how long to hold it, and none of that was there when she first said it out loud in a room of about fifteen people with her hands shaking.

The story is true. Every word of it is true and she has never embellished it and she would not.

But it has become a thing she owns.

That is the closest she can get to it. It used to be something that happened to her and that she came out of, and now it is the most interesting thing about her, and she has begun to be aware that she introduces it into conversations rather than the other way round.

And underneath that, one worse thought, which arrived that evening and has never left.

If the story is what she has, then she needs it to stay the most important thing about her, and that means part of her has an interest in the ground not being finished with. Not consciously. Nobody is doing this on purpose. But a woman whose value is her testimony is a woman who cannot afford to be simply well.

She is thirty-eight. She was twenty-nine when it happened.

You may know this.

Maybe you have a version with timing in it too. Maybe you have noticed yourself steering toward it. Maybe you have never noticed and are noticing now, and that is not a pleasant feeling and I am sorry.

Nobody is telling you to stop telling it

Let me kill the wrong reading immediately, because it is the obvious one and it would be a disaster.

I am not telling you to stop telling your story. Telling it is one of the most useful things a human being can do for another one. Somebody in a room heard you and got up the next week and made a phone call, and you will never know about most of that.

I am not telling you the polish is dishonest. You have told it eighty times; of course it has shape now. A thing you say often gets better at being said and that is not a moral failing, it is language.

And I am not telling you to be ashamed of the flicker at the laugh. You are a human being who said something well and enjoyed it, and if that is the charge then everybody who has ever spoken is guilty.

What I want to look at is ownership, which is a different question from telling.

The word Paul uses

There is a sentence in Philippians where Paul, who had a considerable story and told it, says what he does with what is behind him.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.Philippians 3:13

Now, be careful with forgetting, because it is not amnesia and it cannot be, since Paul recounts his own history at length in at least three places after writing this.

The sense is closer to not holding on. Not letting it be the thing you are gripping while you reach.

And notice the physical picture, because it is a runner's picture. You cannot reach forward with a full hand. The forgetting in that verse is not about the memory being erased; it is about what the hand is doing.

And your story is something that happened to you rather than the thing you are. The written word has Paul refusing to hold what is behind while reaching, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who got home from a good evening and could not settle.

And you are not required to keep earning your place by retelling it. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, and the Spirit is the one who makes not of yourselves cover the testimony too.

The interest you did not choose to have

Now let me deal with the worse thought, because I think you were right and I do not want to comfort you out of an accurate observation.

You are right that there is an interest. When a person's value in a room is a story about a hard thing, that person has, structurally, an interest in the hard thing remaining central. Nobody chooses that. It is a shape that forms in the same way water forms a channel.

That is not wickedness and I am not treating it as such. It is a hazard of being useful.

And the way out is not to stop telling it. It is to have your value be somewhere else, so that the telling can be a gift rather than a deposit.

And what you are worth is not stored in what you have been through. The word says he hath made us accepted in the beloved, which locates it in Him and in a relationship rather than in a biography, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than checking your material.

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 just noticed something uncomfortable about her own motives and is being hard on herself about it.