I Did Not Nod

Sharlene did not nod, and that is the entire incident, and it has cost her three months.

It was a Tuesday. Twenty-two people, the small hall, an item that had been coming for a while and that everybody knew was coming.

The person at the front explained it and then said, in the way people do, "So, everyone happy with that?"

And around the room, heads moved. Not dramatically. That small, brief, downward tilt that a room does when it wants to be agreeable and get to the next thing.

And Sharlene sat entirely still.

She did not say anything. She did not raise a hand, she did not object, she did not so much as frown, and she is genuinely not certain that a single human being in that hall registered it.

She registered it.

She has gone over that four seconds more times than she would admit to anybody. Whether her stillness was a statement. Whether the woman on her left saw. Whether she should have nodded for the sake of the room and taken it up later, and what it says about her that she did not.

And underneath all of that, running the whole three months, is the question she cannot get to leave: what does it mean that I could not make myself agree?

She is not a difficult woman. That is the part that has made it worse. She has served in that building for eleven years. She has never once been in a disagreement anybody would remember. She is the person people ask to talk to somebody.

And she sat still on a Tuesday and she has been on trial about it since April.

Her aunt Verity got it out of her over paper cups after something else entirely, in the kitchen, with the urn ticking as it cooled.

She let the whole thing come out. Sharlene got to the end of it, and to the what does it mean, and stopped.

And Verity said, "Let me get this straight. You did not nod."

Sharlene said yes.

"You did not speak."

"No."

"You did not object, you did not frown, and you are not sure anybody saw."

"No."

And Verity put her cup down and said, "Baby. You have put yourself on trial for a neck."

Now let me ask you what yours was.

Because there is something. A silence you kept, a hand you did not raise, a signature you gave without meaning it, a moment your face did not do what the room's face was doing. And you have been holding a hearing about it ever since.

The instruction already exists

Peter writes to leaders scattered across five provinces, and he tells them how to hold what they have been given.

Shepherd the flock of God among you, exercising oversight not under compulsion, but voluntarily, according to the will of God; and not for sordid gain, but with eagerness; nor yet as lording it over those allotted to your charge, but proving to be examples to the flock.1 Peter 5:2 to 3

Not lording it over. The instruction exists. It is written down, it is addressed to the people holding the responsibility, and it is not an afterthought: Peter puts it in a short letter with very little room in it.

Proving to be examples. Which is a form of authority that has to be watchable. An example is a thing people look at, and looking at it is not insubordination, it is what an example is for.

Now I want to be immediately clear about how I am using that, because it would be easy and wrong to use it the other way.

I am not applying it to anybody in your building. I do not know them. I do not know that Tuesday and I do not know what the item was, and nothing in this article is a judgment on the person at the front, who may well have been carrying that thing alone for years because no one ever helped them hold it.

I am using it for one purpose only: to show you that the concern already exists in Scripture. Peter thought it was worth writing down. Which means the instinct that made your neck stay still is not a foreign object that got into you; it is an instinct the New Testament shares.

So hear this said over you, in a kitchen with the urn cooling. Your stillness on a Tuesday was not rebellion, and the sense you have that authority is meant to be watchable came from the same place Peter's letter came from. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who convicts a person of what is actually wrong with them, which means three months of a hearing that never reached a verdict was not Him deliberating.

Now let me name what those three months have actually been, because it is worth seeing plainly.

You have been prosecuting a body part.

Your neck did not move. That is the offense. And on the strength of that you have opened an inquiry into your own motives, your own attitude, your eleven years, and whether you are the sort of person who is secretly difficult.

And here is what tells you it is not conviction. Conviction is specific. It names a thing you did, it names it once, it is unmistakable when it comes, and it is followed by relief. What you have had for three months is a general, circling unease that has never once told you what the charge is.

That is not the Holy Spirit taking a long time. That is not Him.

You are able to disagree inside your own head and stay in the room, and that is not hypocrisy, it is ordinary. There are seasons for saying it out loud and seasons for keeping it, and Scripture says so, and you have never been given a rule that says your face must match a room.

Nothing here tells you to raise it. Not next Tuesday, not privately, not at all. I do not know what it would cost you or what those eleven years are worth, and I am not going to spend them from here. If you never say a word about that item, you have not failed anything in this article.

There was a movement five hundred years ago that wrote whole structures for exactly this problem, and the reason was not suspicion of leaders. It was that they had watched too many ordinary faithful people end up in Sharlene's three months: quietly certain they must be the problem, in a room that had no way of receiving the fact that they were not.