The Sentence I Still Argue With

Rosalind was nineteen and it took about six seconds and the woman who said it has been dead for eleven years.

That is the part that ought to have settled it and has not. The woman is dead. She died at ninety-one and Rosalind went to the funeral and cried, genuinely, because it was complicated and there had been a great deal of good in her too.

And Rosalind is fifty-four and she is still arguing.

The sentence was about what she was like and what she would turn out to be. It was said in a kitchen, not in anger, to somebody else, about Rosalind, in her hearing, in the way people did then when they thought you were young enough not to count.

She could quote it now. She will not, and I am not going to write it down, because that sentence has had enough of her life.

What she will tell you is the shape of what happened afterwards.

She has spent thirty-five years assembling the case. Not on purpose. But every achievement has gone into a file. Every time somebody has said something warm about her, part of her has filed it. She has, without ever deciding to, built a body of evidence that would completely demolish six seconds in a kitchen, and she has never been able to submit it, because there is nobody to submit it to.

And here is the thing she worked out at about forty-eight and has not known what to do with since.

The file is not for the woman. The woman was never going to read it. The file is for the jury, and the jury has been in permanent session in Rosalind's head since 1991, and she is the one who keeps convening it.

You may have your own six seconds.

A parent, a teacher, an aunt, somebody at school. And you have been building the file ever since, and the person may not even be alive, and the court is still sitting.

What I am not going to say

Let me clear the room first.

I am not going to tell you the sentence did not matter. It went into a nineteen year old and it has shaped thirty-five years, and a thing that does that is not nothing, whatever anybody's intentions were.

I am not going to tell you to forgive her and feel better, as though that is a switch. You may well have forgiven her already. Forgiveness and the file are not the same mechanism, and a person can genuinely release somebody and still be assembling evidence, and being told to forgive again just adds a failure.

I am not going to defend the woman to you. I did not know her. There was a great deal of good in her and there was also that, and both stand.

What I want to ask about is the court.

Whose verdict stands

There is a promise in Isaiah, and people usually quote the first half and stop, and the second half is the one for you.

No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn.Isaiah 54:17

Every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment.

Not every weapon. Tongues, specifically, and the arena named is judgment. Somebody speaking a verdict over a person.

And look at what is promised. Not that no tongue rises. It plainly says they do. What is promised is about which verdict stands, and the answer given is not the one spoken in the kitchen.

Which means the case has already been decided, and it was decided somewhere other than the court you have been convening, and the file you have spent thirty-five years compiling was never needed as evidence in the trial that counts.

And the verdict spoken over you at nineteen does not stand. The written word does not promise that no tongue speaks, it settles which speech holds, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been filing since 1991.

And you were never the one who had to win that case. The word says it is God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring you to present anything.

What the file has cost

Now let me name the price, because I think you already know it and have never said it.

Thirty-five years of achievement has been partly for her.

Not all of it. Much of what you have done, you have done because you loved it and because it needed doing. But some proportion of it, and you would know better than me what proportion, has been evidence-gathering, and evidence-gathering has a particular flavour that ordinary work does not have. It is never finished. It cannot be, because the verdict never comes back.

That is why the good things have not landed the way you expected them to. They were going into a file rather than into your life.

And what you have done is yours and not exhibits. The word says we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them, and the Spirit is the one who makes them a walk rather than a defense.

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 kept a court sitting for thirty-five years.