Better Never to Have Known

She knew the books of the Bible in order before she could ride a bicycle.

That is the part that makes this hard, and I want to say it first. She was not a stranger who wandered in. She was raised in it. Sword drills. The whole of the fourth chapter of Philippians for a certificate she still has in a drawer. Her grandmother's church, third row, every Sunday and most Wednesdays, and she could tell you what the pastor was going to say before he said it and she was usually right.

Then her thirties happened. It is not one story and it is not going in this article, because it is hers. What matters is that she went a long way off, and she went knowing exactly what she was doing, which is the whole of the trouble.

She came back at forty-four. She has been back six years. She serves in the kitchen, she has led a group, she is in that building more than most.

And in the second year back she found this.

For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.

She has never said it out loud to a person. Not to her husband. Not to the woman she cooks alongside every Sunday who tells her everything. She has just carried it, six years now, and it has grown a specific and terrible shape: that the very thing she has always been most grateful for, being raised in it, being taught it early, knowing every word of it, is the thing that is being held against her.

Maybe you have that verse. It may be a different one. But you have a sentence that found you at the wrong moment, and it has been reading you ever since instead of the other way around.

Sit down here at this table. I am not going to tell you the fear is silly and I am not going to hand you a verdict.

I am not going to wave it away

First, honesty, because you would know a dodge from three tables away.

That verse is in the Bible. Peter wrote it, and he meant it, and it is a hard sentence. Anybody who pats your hand and tells you not to worry about that one is not helping you, they are managing you, and after six years you can tell the difference instantly.

So I will not do that. What I will say is this: read who Peter is describing across that whole chapter. He spends the entire second chapter on teachers who came in and made a business out of it, who exploit people with false words, who promise freedom while being themselves slaves of corruption, who never stopped and never wanted to. That is a settled trade, not a season. It is a man selling the thing while despising it.

And the sentence that follows says they returned to it, deliberately and finally, as their permanent home.

You were the one who came back, and coming back is the one thing that chapter never describes anybody doing, and that is what is written there and not a thing I have added, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walked you through the doors of that building at forty-four. No woman is dragged home by the thing that is condemning her.

Knowing it early was never the charge

Now the shape your fear has taken, because it is a specific one and it deserves a specific answer.

The conclusion has landed like this: being raised in it raised the price. The sword drills and the certificate in the drawer are exhibits. Knowledge is the aggravating factor.

Here is what Scripture actually does with knowing. It is a Pharisee who knew it all and stayed outside, and it is a thief on a cross who knew almost nothing and was told today. But that same Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, the man who knew more of it than anybody alive and used the knowledge to hunt down people who believed, is the one who writes down his own case afterward:

Formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.1 Timothy 1:13-14

And then he says why God did it that way, in the next verse: as an example, so that anybody who came after would see it and not despair. You have Paul's own testimony written down expressly so a woman in year six of this would find it, and that is what the passage says it is for, and the Spirit is the One who arranges for a verse to be lying exactly where somebody trips over it.

You were never being charged extra for the certificate in the drawer, and 1 Timothy 1 is where the man who knew the most says the grace overflowed, and it is His Spirit and not your childhood that decides how much of it reaches you.

The fear is not the evidence

One more, and this is the load bearing one.

Six years of terror over a passage is not the behavior of a person who has turned back to it as a home. It is the behavior of a woman who loves something and is frightened of having lost it. Those are not the same posture and nothing in that chapter confuses them.

You are afraid of losing what is still yours, and Scripture says godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you inside that fear rather than letting you go numb about it. Numb would have been easier. Numb is available. You have not been given it, and there is a reason.

I will not tell you the verse cannot be about you, because no person can look inside another person from a page, and anybody who claims that is selling something. What I will say is that this is not the state of a woman that chapter is describing, and that a question this size does not get settled by a woman alone in a kitchen at night.