When I Stopped Trusting My Own Yes

It is half past eleven and she is still at the kitchen table.

The tea went cold about an hour ago and there is a ring on the wood from where the mug sat. She is trying to work out whether one sentence she read at three o'clock this afternoon is true.

She has read four accounts of it. All four are calm. All four sound like a person who has looked into it properly. Two of them agree with each other and disagree with the other two, and each one has the tone of somebody being patient with people who have not thought it through.

She used to be quick. That is the part that keeps catching her.

She was the one the others asked. Not about anything grand, just about whether something rang right. She had a way of putting her head slightly on one side, and then saying, mildly, "I don't think that's right," and being correct about it often enough that people started checking with her first. It was never a gift she made a fuss of. It was just how her head worked.

Now she cannot tell whether the sentence from three o'clock is true. And underneath that, much worse, she cannot tell whether her unease about it is discernment or a late lunch.

She closes the laptop.

She opens it again and checks one more thing.

At about ten to twelve her daughter appears in the doorway in a dressing gown, on the way to bed, and asks, without any weight at all, whether Nana would prefer the blue one or the green one.

And she hears herself say, "I don't know, what do you think?"

She has said that seven times this week. About seven different things, none of them hard, and all of them things she would have answered in a second three years ago.

That is the moment it goes cold, and it is not about the sentence from three o'clock at all.

You know that doorway. Maybe yours has a different question in it, and maybe you have made a joke of it and called yourself indecisive, but something has gone out of you that used to be simply there. Everything that arrives now arrives sounding certain, all of it, in the same confident voice, and after enough of that a person stops trusting the instrument they used to sort with.

It is not the world you are frightened of. It is the fact that you can no longer hear yourself over it.

The ground under all of it

There is one verse for this and it is so familiar that it slides past. Slow down on the middle line.

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.Proverbs 3:5-6

Lean not unto thine own understanding.

Now hear what that sentence is not. It is not an insult about your intelligence, and it is not an instruction to stop thinking. It is a load-bearing statement about where the weight goes. Leaning is what you do with your body weight. The verse is telling you which wall holds you up.

And here is the thing that turns the whole night around: it was never your own understanding. Not three years ago either, when you were quick and people asked you first. The steadiness you had then was not manufactured by the quality of your own judgement, and losing confidence in that judgement has not knocked away the thing you were actually standing on.

You are standing on ground you did not lay and cannot lose. That is precisely what Proverbs 3:5 does when it moves the leaning off your own understanding and puts it on Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a person steady, which is why the shaking of your confidence and the shaking of your footing are two entirely different events.

The instrument and the ground

Something worth separating out, because they have become fused and the fusing is doing the damage.

One: your ability to sort quickly through what is in front of you. That is an instrument. Instruments get tired. They get overloaded. Give any instrument enough input arriving in the same confident tone and it starts to swing, and that is a fact about volume rather than a fact about you.

Two: your footing before God. That is not an instrument at all. It was never something you produced, so it is not something you can be argued out of.

You have not lost your standing with God by losing confidence in your own head. Nothing in Scripture ties your place with Him to the sharpness of your judgement, and the Holy Spirit who was given to you was never issued on the basis of how well you sorted things.

There is a fear under this that should be said out loud, because it is the real one and it is not the one you would say in a group.

It is not what if I believe something false. It is what if I have become the kind of woman who can be fooled. It is the sound of somebody who used to be relied on, watching that go, and being quietly ashamed of it.

You were never being kept safe by being clever. Scripture puts the keeping with the Shepherd and never with the sheep's navigation, and it is the Holy Spirit who leads into truth, which He is described as doing rather than as coaching you to find it yourself.

And notice what is not going to happen on this page. Nothing here is going to sort out the sentence from three o'clock for you. There will be no method, no five tests, no checklist for telling the true thing from the confident thing. You did not come here to be better informed. You came here at half past eleven with a cold mug and a ring on the table, and what you need is not more input.

You are allowed to put it down without having resolved it. He promised rest to the ones who come heavy laden and did not attach a condition about finishing the work first, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it possible to close a laptop on an unfinished question and actually sleep.