I Cannot Take a Compliment

Somebody said it again on Sunday. You are so good with people.

Watch what she does. It takes about half a second and it is smooth as anything. A small laugh that is not really a laugh, a shift of the eyes to somewhere over the person's left shoulder, and then a sentence that moves the whole thing along: oh, well, everyone here is. Perfectly warm. Nobody has ever noticed.

She is forty-four. She has done the pastoral visiting in that little church for eleven years, and she is genuinely good at it. She notices who is not there. She is the one who sits with people. If you asked that congregation to name somebody kind you would hear her name.

And every single time a kind word arrives, something in her steps in front of it.

Here is the sentence underneath. There is one thing from a long time ago about how she treated somebody, and it is not the sort of thing that makes a headline, it is worse than that, it is the sort of thing that tells you what a person is actually like. She settled it with God years ago. She is not confused about the doctrine. She has told other people about the doctrine sitting in their own kitchens with their own tea going cold in front of them, and meant every word.

And when somebody says she is good with people, the sentence rises up like a hand and says: they do not know.

She has told nobody. Not the friend she walks with. Not the pastor. Not her sister. Because it would require explaining a thing she has no wish to explain, and because it looks, from the outside, exactly like humility, which is the most convenient disguise available.

Maybe you flinch. It might not be compliments. It might be being thanked, or chosen, or trusted with something. Somebody hands you a good word and something inside you steps in front of it, and after enough years you have stopped calling that a habit and started reading it as an accurate correction.

Sit down here where the rain has stopped. There is nothing coming that will tell you the flinch is nothing.

The flinch is not an assessment

Let me put the distinction where you can see it, because everything else here stands on it.

There is what is legally true about a woman and there is what rises in her when somebody is kind. Two registers. They can disagree for eleven years without either one moving the other. A verdict is entered in a court. A flinch happens in half a second in a body, and half a second is not enough time for anything to be weighed.

The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness; He will quiet you by His love; He will exult over you with loud singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Read what God is doing in that verse. Not tolerating. Not overlooking. Rejoicing, exulting, singing out loud. You are being sung over by God right now, as you read this, and Zephaniah 3 is where that is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your own half second who reports on what He thinks of you.

And look at the middle clause, because it is the one for you: He will quiet you by His love. There is a quieting in that verse, and the thing doing the quieting is His love and not your self-assessment. That is a promise about who does the work. It is not a schedule.

You have been holding God to a timetable that is not written anywhere, and Zephaniah 3 says instead that He rejoices over you with gladness, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a woman reading the actual sentence.

What the sentence is actually defending

Now the mechanism, because you would spot a comforting evasion at forty paces.

The flinch is not really about modesty and it is not really about the compliment. It is a guard. Somewhere in you there is a belief that the good word has been given on incomplete information, and that if the person knew the one thing they would take it back. So the flinch gets there first. It withdraws the compliment on their behalf before they can, which is much less painful than being corrected later.

And there is a second thing under it, quieter and heavier. Accepting the kind word would mean accepting that a woman can be genuinely good with people and also be the person who did that thing. And she has never been able to hold those two facts in one hand, so she keeps dropping one, and the one she keeps dropping is the good one.

You were never being asked to choose between those two, and Romans 3 says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by His grace as a gift, and the Spirit is the one who can hold both of those about a person at the same time without dropping either. That is what grace is. It is not the sentence being false. It is the sentence being true and no longer being the thing you are.

I am not promising you will stop flinching

Now the honest part, and I will not do to you what somebody once did with the kindest of intentions.

I do not know that the flinch will stop. Nobody does. For some people it thins out over a year once the reading changes. For others it is still there in some form for a long time, quieter, less believed. There is no timetable in Scripture and I am not going to invent one so this ends more tidily than it should.

What I will tell you is that the flinch was never what made the pardon real, so it has never been in a position to unmake it. You were cleared by a finished work and not by a settled reaction, and Hebrews 10 says by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and the Spirit is what holds that up on a Sunday when something in you steps in front of a kind word.

And here is what you are allowed to do, and I doubt anybody has offered it. You are allowed to say the true thing out loud right after the next flinch. Not instead of it. After. That is not pretending. Pretending would be telling your friend you find compliments easy. Saying the verdict on the heels of the flinch is the opposite of pretending: it is telling the truth about the court and the truth about the half second in the same breath.