The Tone I Used About The Tea

Half past eleven, and the plates are done, and she is standing at the sink with her hands in water that has gone cold because she stopped halfway through.

Her mother went down at nine. The chair in the front room is where the sofa used to be. There is a rail on the stairs now, and a plastic mat in the bathroom, and the little clock on the mantelpiece is about the only thing left in that house standing where it stood three years ago.

Today her mother asked for a cup of tea. That was all it was. And she heard herself say yes in a voice with an edge on it, a short flat voice she did not recognize as her own, and she watched her mother notice it and say nothing.

She has been thinking about that voice all evening.

She gave up the job in the March. There was no argument about it and she would do it again and she means that. It is also true that nobody rings on a Tuesday to ask how she is, and that her brother phones on a Sunday and tells her she is amazing, and that something in her wants to put the phone in the bin when he says it.

And underneath the whole of it, said to nobody, over cold water: I have given everything I had, and this is what I have turned into.

She would never say that in church. She has never said it out loud anywhere.

If there is a sentence like that sitting in you tonight, then before we go one line further you should know that I am not going to correct it, and neither is He.

What Naomi was allowed to say

There is a woman in the Bible who walked back into her home town after everything she had was gone, and the whole place came out into the street to meet her, and she stopped them where they stood.

Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.Ruth 1:20

Naomi means pleasant. Mara means bitter. She stood in front of women she had grown up with and told them to stop using the pleasant name because it was no longer accurate, and she named who she held responsible for that in the very same breath.

Now read what happens next, because it is what is not there that matters. Nobody rebukes her. The narrator does not step in to tidy her theology. God does not answer her with a lecture. There is no verse where a wiser character takes her aside and explains that she really ought not to speak like that about the Almighty. The Holy Spirit carried that sentence into the written word in her own wording and left it standing exactly as she said it in the road.

So you are allowed to say the true thing about how this has gone. Not the tidied version of it. That one. Scripture kept a woman's bitter sentence on the page uncorrected and never once asked her to withdraw it, and the same Spirit who kept it there is the one living in you at the sink tonight.

And let me tell you what I am not doing with Naomi, because it would be easy and it would be a lie. I am not pointing at how her story finished. What happened later in her life is her story and not a promise about yours, and nothing on this page knows one thing about what happens in your house. What I am pointing at is what she was allowed to say in the middle of it, while she still knew nothing at all.

What a load does to a material

In my trade there is a thing called work hardening, and I have wanted to explain it to somebody in your position for a long time.

Take a piece of soft metal and bend it, and straighten it, and bend it again in the same place, day after day after day. It does not stay soft. The structure inside it reorganizes under the repeated load, and it grows harder, and it grows more brittle, and in the end it will crack in the place that used to be the most flexible part of the whole piece.

Here is what matters about that. It is not a defect in the metal. It is not the metal being ungrateful for having been made. It is simply what a load does to a material over time, and any engineer who stood there blaming the steel for it would be walked out of the workshop.

You have been bent in the same place for three years. That edge in your voice this afternoon was not the discovery of who you have secretly been all along. It was a property of a material under a load that nobody was ever built to carry on their own, and His word says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and the Spirit who lives in you has never once mistaken your tiredness for a change of heart.

Now, the remedy. Work hardening is undone by annealing. You heat the metal and you hold it there and you let it cool slowly, and the structure settles back, and the ductility returns to it. Notice who does the work in that sentence. The metal does not soften itself by deciding to be softer. It does not apologize for having been bent. Somebody else applies the heat, patiently, and what was lost comes back into it.

He is not offended by the tone you used

You have been braced for a telling off. Somewhere under the tiredness you have been waiting for God to say something about the voice you used over the tea, and about the phone and the bin, and about the sentence you said over cold water. So let me be plain with you out of His word rather than out of my own kindness, with the Holy Spirit as the one who makes it land.

It has not come. It is not coming.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Read the word now in that verse. Not later, when you are gentler. Not once the bitterness has been dealt with. Now, tonight, in the third year, with the edge still in your voice. You are held in Christ this minute exactly as you are, His word puts that beyond argument, and the Spirit who lives in you is not gathering evidence.

Nobody here is going to ask you to apologize for how you got here before the ministering can start. That is a bargain God never proposed. He is softening what went hard, and He is doing it without a word of correction on the way past. Scripture never once records Him asking Naomi for an apology, and the Spirit who lives in you is not waiting on one from you either.

And if you are at the end of what one person can carry, then reach for real help, today, and let somebody stand in that house beside you. That is not a failure of love and it is not a failure of faith. It is a load being shared, which is what loads are for.