Ten Thousand Times

She has counted, roughly, once, and then decided not to count again.

If it is four times a day, and it is not fewer than that, and it has been going on for about seven years, then the number is somewhere north of ten thousand. Ten thousand runs of the same forty minutes. The kitchen, the bag, the conversation at the door, the drive, and then the part she does not describe to anybody.

She had no reason. That is the thing everybody says and it is true and it changes nothing at eleven at night. Everybody she has told the sequence to has said the same words back to her: you had no reason to think anything. Every single person. Including a professional, once.

And she is twenty-nine now, and it is seven years, and here is what people say. You have to forgive yourself. Her mother says it. Her best friend said it in a parking lot last spring with the engine running. Two people from her church have said it. Every one of them meaning it as a kindness and none of them able to tell her, if she pressed, what it is that a person does.

She knows what it is to be forgiven by God. That happened, on a bathroom floor in the first year, in words she would be embarrassed to repeat, and it was real and it has never come apart.

What she cannot find is the second place. Where is it. What does she do there. Is it a feeling. Is it a decision. If it is a decision, why can she not just make it, and if it is a feeling, how does anybody make a feeling on purpose.

So seven years have gone by in which she has been failing to complete something nobody has ever been able to describe.

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 do, and quietly added it to the list of things you cannot manage.

Sit down on the rug. Nothing coming is going to hand you a procedure.

There is no second place to go

Let me say the thing nobody has said, and it may take a couple of days to work out whether it lands as a relief or an insult.

There is no such place.

Not far away. Not something other people have found and you have not. It does not exist. Nowhere in Scripture does a person forgive herself. Not one person in the whole book does it. Nobody is instructed to. The phrase is not in there at all. It came into ordinary speech about a hundred years ago, usually out of the mouths of people who are trying to name something real, and what they are pointing at does exist, but it is not a second pardon.

You have not been failing at anything, and Scripture never once puts a second forgiveness between a person and her peace, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you unable to find a place that was never built. Seven years of not completing an impossible task is not a fault in you. That is the right answer.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.Psalm 34:18

Look at where He is in that sentence. Near. Not waiting at the end of a process you have to complete first, and not standing back until you have got yourself sorted out. Near, to the exact person who is crushed. You are the person that verse is nearest to right now, as you read this, and Psalm 34 is where it is written, and it is His Spirit who does the nearness and not your progress.

What ten thousand runs actually are

So if the second place does not exist, what have seven years been? Something real, with a name, and the name is not forgiveness.

A rerun has been playing.

Four times a day. It is exactly the same every time. The kitchen, the bag, the conversation at the door, the drive. The footage does not change, no new material ever arrives, and no new conclusion is ever reached, because a rerun is not an investigation. It is a loop.

And here is the thing about the loop that has kept it running: somewhere in you there is a belief that if you watch it enough times, something will resolve. A different ending, or a piece of evidence, or a moment where you finally see what you should have seen. Ten thousand runs is ten thousand pieces of evidence that this is not what happens.

You were never going to get a verdict out of a rerun, and 1 Corinthians 4 says Paul refused to judge even himself and left the verdict to the Lord, and it is the Spirit who lifts a person out of a seat she was never qualified to sit in. The loop is not a trial. It is a room with a screen in it and one person watching.

Not a step to add, a screen to turn off

Here is the turn, and it takes something away rather than adding it.

The problem was never a second thing left undone. The problem is a first thing that was never yours to do: reviewing a decision that God has already ruled on, in the hope that a rerun will produce what a court already produced. And nobody can close a case she was never authorized to open. What she can do is get up and go out of the room.

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 all of it. There is nothing to get right and it will not feel like an achievement. It is a person turning off a screen and leaving a room that was never a courtroom.

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 young mother who had no reason to think anything.