The Pen on the Chain

The pen is chained to the counter and the chain is one of those little silver ball ones, and it is exactly four inches too short, so that everybody who ever signs anything in this branch has to lean.

She is leaning now. Name here, date here, sign in the box, and the girl behind the glass is lovely, chatty, about twenty-three, telling her the machine has been playing up all morning. She writes her name. She writes it neat, because she has always written it neat, and the loop on the last letter is the same loop it has been since she was fourteen years old.

She does not look up while she signs. She does not look up when she slides it back. When the girl says lovely, thank you, that is all sorted for you, she says thank you to the counter, warm and real, and picks up her bag, and goes out into the morning, and the girl behind the glass thinks she was a very nice woman and thinks nothing else about it at all.

Here is the piece nobody sees. She used to hope this would lift.

She used to hope hard. Twelve years of hoping, in fact, and hoping the way you do when you mean it: at the front of a room with her hand up, in a car park afterward crying, on a Tuesday morning with a Bible open and her whole chest full of it. And every time, some weeks later, it came back. And after enough of that, hoping stopped feeling like faith and started feeling like being made a fool of, in public, by herself. So she stopped. And nobody noticed that either, because it is a quiet thing to stop doing.

If your throat went tight reading that, sit down here with me, and let me say plainly who I am talking to today. Not the one carrying what somebody else did to them. That message is on this site, it is yours, and it does not use one word of what I am about to say. Today I am talking to the one who did something, took it to God straight and meant every word of it, and cannot lift her eyes in a room full of people who know nothing.

Two wounds came in together and only one got a doctor

Guilt says: I did something wrong. Shame says: I am something wrong.

They walk in together, they use the same voice, and nobody separates them for you. So an honest woman confesses a thing properly, and the account genuinely closes, and the weight does not move an inch, and she draws the only conclusion available to her, which is that something must be wrong with her.

Nothing is wrong with you. You had two injuries and one medicine, and nobody told you. That is on those of us who teach and I take my portion of it and I am not passing it to you.

Confession is the appointed remedy for guilt and it worked. Every count closed. You are cleared, and you have been cleared since the hour you asked, and you are not the count. That is not encouragement I am handing you. It is written that if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the volume of my sentence, who takes a settled thing down into a body that has been braced against it for twelve years.

But shame is not a verdict about an act, so confession was never going to touch it, and your twelve years of trying were not wasted and they were not evidence about you. They were the right medicine on the wrong wound.

And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.Romans 5:5

Now look at what Paul does not say there, because this is the part that has been stolen from you.

He does not say hope works if you keep it up. He does not say hope pays off for the ones who manage not to get tired. He says hope does not make a person ashamed, and then he immediately tells you why, and the reason is not one thing about the person hoping. The reason is that the love of God has been poured out in the heart, and the one doing the pouring is the Holy Spirit, who has been given.

Given. Past tense. Already in the room.

You have the love of God poured out in you right now, and you were never the guarantee on your own hope. That is what the written word says in as many words, and the Holy Spirit named in that verse is the one holding the whole arrangement up, which means the thing that failed twelve times was never the thing the promise rested on.

Hope was not the thing that let you down

I want to say something about those twelve years, because you have filed them under failure and they are filed wrong.

You were not foolish. You were hoping into a wound that hope was not the medicine for, and the disappointment you kept meeting was not God declining you. It was the same misfiling all over again: a person taking the cure for guilt into a room where guilt was not the problem.

So we are not going to ask you to try harder at hoping. That is not the ask and it never will be here.

You are held tonight by a love that was poured out before you got tired, and you have it whether the feeling shows up this evening or not. Scripture says nothing can separate us from that love, and it is His Spirit, not your stamina, who keeps the seal on it.