She Asked Me Once

Come this weekend. That was it. Six words on a Tuesday, and not urgent, and not in a voice that had anything in it.

She said next weekend. She had a thing on. It was a real thing and not an excuse and it would not have made a headline in anybody's life. She said next weekend and her sister said okay and they talked for another ten minutes about something else entirely and it was an ordinary phone call between two women who had been having ordinary phone calls for forty years.

There was no next weekend.

Six years ago. She is fifty-eight.

And here is the sentence she has heard from everybody in her life since: you have to forgive yourself. Her husband. Her daughter, twice. Two women on the prayer team who love her. A pastor who is good at his job and who said it with his whole heart. Every one of them meaning it. Not one of them able to tell her, if she had asked, where a woman goes to do it.

Because she knows what it is to be forgiven by God. That is not the missing piece. She took the whole thing to Him in the first month, out loud, in her own kitchen at two in the morning with her hands on the counter, and something real happened and it has never come apart.

What she cannot find is the second window. Which line does a woman stand in. Who is behind the glass. What does she hand over and what does she get back and how would she ever know the thing had cleared.

So for six years she has been failing at an errand nobody could give her directions to.

Maybe somebody has told you to forgive yourself. And maybe you nodded, and went home, and had no idea in the world what you were meant to actually do, and put the not knowing on the pile with everything else that is your fault.

Sit down here at the end of the table. Nothing coming is going to hand you a procedure.

There is no second window

Let me say it plainly, because six years of being polite about this has cost more than enough already.

That window does not exist.

Not closed. Not around a corner you have not turned. It was never built. Nowhere in Scripture does a person forgive herself. Nobody in the book does it. Nobody is instructed to. The phrase is not in there. It came into ordinary speech in the last century, and it is usually said by people trying to name something real, and the thing they are gesturing at exists, but it is not a second pardon and there is no line anybody has been failing to join.

You have not been failing at anything, and Scripture never once puts a second forgiveness between a woman and her rest, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you unable to find a window nobody ever cut. Six years of not completing an impossible errand is not a flaw in you. That is the right answer.

If You, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with You there is forgiveness, that You may be feared.Psalm 130:3-4

Read the question and then read who is not asking it. The psalmist asks whether anybody could stand if God kept a record. And the answer, in the very next line, is that He does not, and that this is what makes Him fearful in the true sense: awesome, weighty, worth everything.

You are dealing with a God who does not mark iniquities, and Psalm 130 is where that is written, and it is His Spirit who reports on what is being recorded and not the book you have been keeping in your own head.

The book you have been keeping

So if the window does not exist, what has six years been? Something real, and it has a name, and the name is not forgiveness.

A record has been kept.

It is a good one. That is what is remarkable about it. It has the day of the week and the six words and the tone of her voice and the exact thing you had on and how little it mattered. It has your answer written out in full. It does not have the forty years of Tuesdays in it. It does not have the four hundred times you did go, or the year you moved in with her, or any of the ordinary faithfulness that anybody looking at your life from outside would put in the first paragraph.

That is not a record. That is a case file kept by a prosecutor, and the prosecutor is you, and there has never been a hearing because a book kept in a kitchen is not a court.

You were never appointed to keep that record, and Psalm 130 says that if the Lord marked iniquities nobody at all could stand, and it is the Spirit who takes a pen out of a woman's hand. God is not keeping the book. Nobody is keeping the book. There is one book being kept in that house and you have been writing it yourself for six years.

Not a step to add, a book to close

Here is the turn, and it is a putting down and not a picking up.

The problem was never a second thing left undone. The problem is a first thing that was never yours to do: keeping a record God is not keeping. And nobody can close a case she was never authorized to open. What she can do is put the pen down.

Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls.Romans 14:4

So the move is not to forgive yourself. The move is to say out loud that you are not the judge in this, and then to say who is. That is the whole of it. There is no technique, no wording to get right, and it will not feel like an accomplishment. It is a woman closing a book and pushing it across a table.

You have a case that was closed by the only judge with standing in it, and it is written that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit is what makes that a fact about a woman who said next weekend on an ordinary Tuesday.