The Case I Kept Rehearsing

The drive is twelve minutes and she knows every second of it.

Out of the estate, left at the postbox, past the school with the faded zebra crossing, and then the mini roundabout by the garden center. That is where it starts. It has started there every Sunday since the spring.

By the garden center she is back in the meeting. The small room with the stacking chairs. The mug of tea nobody drank. The sentence he said, which she can still quote with the pauses in the right places, and the way three people looked at the carpet instead of at her. She has answered it a thousand times in this car and she answers it again now, and this time it is airtight. This time she has the dates in order. This time she does not cry.

By the traffic lights she has moved on to what she should have said instead. By the industrial estate she is explaining herself to people who were not even in the room. By the time she indicates into the car park she has won, completely, for the twenty-fourth Sunday running, and her hands are tight on the wheel and her jaw aches.

She switches the engine off.

Through the windscreen there is a woman in a red coat propping the door open with a fire extinguisher, and two teenagers carrying a keyboard case badly, and a man scattering grit on the ramp because there was frost overnight. It looks like a good place. It is a good place. She chose it herself and she has never regretted it.

She sits for a minute with the keys in her hand.

Someone taps the window. A woman she half knows from the welcome desk, holding two hymn books, asking if she is all right, because from outside it looked like she was talking to somebody.

She was. She has been talking to him for twenty-four Sundays, and he has not heard one word of it, and he is not in the car.

You know the roundabout. Maybe it is a roundabout, maybe it is the last set of lights, maybe it is the click of the seatbelt in the drive, but somewhere on that route the file opens by itself, and the opening stopped being a decision a long time ago. You arrive having already spent the best twelve minutes of your week on a conversation with a man who is somewhere else entirely, probably eating toast.

And the hard part is not the anger. The hard part is that the case is well made now. It is careful. It is arguably true. And it is costing you the first song, every single week.

Kindness is the engine, and shame never was

There is an old idea that a person turns when they are finally ashamed enough. Preach hard enough, name it plainly enough, pile the guilt high enough, and the turning will follow. It is a popular theory and it has never worked on anybody, including the people who preach it.

Scripture is almost blunt about the opposite.

Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?Romans 2:4

Look at what is doing the leading in that sentence. Not the shouting. Not the threat. Not the twenty-fourth rehearsal of an argument nobody is present for. The goodness. Kindness is the engine of every real turn any human being has ever made, and if kindness is the engine, then a Sunday morning spent being hard with yourself is a Sunday morning spent with the engine off.

You are already held by a kindness that has never once raised its voice at you about this. That is exactly what the word means when it says the goodness of God is what leads a person to turn, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying that goodness into the car with you every week since the spring, patiently, without ever telling you to be ashamed of the file on your lap.

So let us be clear about what is not being asked.

Nobody is asking you to decide the meeting went well. Nobody is asking you to conclude that the sentence was fine, or that the three people who studied the carpet were right, or that your memory of it has been unfair. The turn in front of you is not a verdict and it never was. The turn is a pair of hands coming off a file.

You have standing permission to stop being the prosecution. Scripture gives that whole office to Someone else, because vengeance belongs to the Lord and He has never needed junior counsel, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than your own effort who lifts a case out of hands that have been gripping it since March.

What the file is actually charging you

A grievance is not free. It rents.

It takes the drive. It takes the doorway. It takes the first two songs while you settle, because a jaw that has been set for twelve minutes does not unset on the threshold. It takes the small talk in the foyer, which comes out slightly too bright. It takes the part of the sermon that would have undone you, because a sentence from March is still being finished.

You were never built to carry a courtroom into a building you came to worship in. Scripture says to cast the whole weight of it on Him because He genuinely cares for you, and the Spirit is the one who takes the weight, and nowhere in what He promised are you asked to first prove the thing was small enough to be worth handing over.

Then there is the fear underneath, and it deserves saying out loud, because it is the reason the file stays open.

If the file goes down, does it mean it did not happen? Does it mean the whole reaction was dramatics? Does it mean he was right about her?

No. Not one of those.

You have not surrendered your discernment by putting the file down. What is written keeps both hands open at once, to be angry and sin not, and to let not the sun go down upon your wrath, so the seeing is permitted and it is the sleeping on it night after night that does the quiet damage, and the Holy Spirit is well able to keep a woman wise about a room she is never walking into again.

And then there is the man, who has to be dealt with, and can only be dealt with one way.

Bless him. Not a feeling. A sentence. Out loud, once, in the car, before the roundabout rather than after it.

You are entirely free to bless a man without endorsing a meeting. Scripture says bless them that curse you and pray for them which despitefully use you, which is an instruction about your mouth and never a statement about their conduct, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets such a sentence out of a person who does not yet feel a single syllable of it. What he does with his life is between him and God, and it was never on your route.