I Thought It Was Me

Her hand got about six inches off her knee.

It was the members' meeting in November, the one with the tea and the folding chairs and the radiator that clanks. Item four. And item four was not a question. It was a sentence, delivered warmly, with thanks to everybody for their patience, and it was already done, and the room said amen the way a room does when it is nearly nine o'clock.

She had a question. It was not even a hard question. It was, who else looked at this.

And her hand came up six inches and then went back down onto her knee, and she sat there for the last two items with her ears going hot, and she said nothing, and afterwards she helped stack the chairs and told the woman on the door that it had been a good meeting.

That was six months ago.

She has not raised it with anybody. She has not talked to a single soul about it, and she has not stopped thinking about it once, and in six months the thing she has actually been examining is not the meeting.

It is herself.

She has been going through her own heart with a lamp. Am I proud. Is this a critical spirit. Is this what people mean when they say somebody has become unteachable. She read a book about submission in March and it made everything worse. She has decided, on the balance of evidence, that there is probably something wrong with her.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you noticed something too. Maybe not in a members' meeting. Maybe it was the way a decision arrived, fully formed, with a we have prayed about this attached to the front of it. Maybe it was the fact that you genuinely cannot name a single person who could say no.

And you did not accuse anybody. You have never once accused anybody. You simply saw a shape, and you have been paying for seeing it ever since, in a currency nobody else knows you are spending.

Noticing is not rebellion

Let me say the thing you have needed for six months, and let me say it first, plainly, before anything else.

You are not rebellious for noticing.

The examination you have been running on yourself is not humility. It looks exactly like humility, which is why it has been able to run for half a year without anybody stopping it, but real humility knows what it is and can say what it is. What you have been doing is closer to a trial with no defense counsel, held nightly, in your own chest.

And it has produced nothing. Six months and you are no holier and no clearer and considerably more tired.

Now let me show you a man the Lord actually stopped and marveled at, because of the one thing he understood.

For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to this one, Go, and he goes, and to another, Come, and he comes.Matthew 8:9

Read what that soldier is saying about himself. He does not begin with the men under him. He begins with the fact that he is under.

He has grasped that his own authority is real precisely because it is not his own. It comes down a chain and it answers up a chain, and every order he gives is only worth anything because somebody above him would back it. Cut the top of that chain and his authority becomes noise in a courtyard.

That is the man Jesus stopped in the road for. Not a scholar. A soldier who understood the architecture of command well enough to see what kind of authority he was actually standing in front of.

So hear what that makes of your six months.

The instinct in you that wants authority to answer to something is not a defect in your submission. It is the same instinct that man had, and it is the reason he recognized Jesus faster than the people who had studied their whole lives. Wanting a thing to be accountable is not the opposite of trusting it. It is very often how you come to trust it.

And now I am going to do something that will feel like an anticlimax, and I want you to let it.

I am not going to tell you what to do about it.

Not one word. I do not know your church, I do not know that meeting, I do not know what was behind item four or who prayed about it or how long they wrestled with it. Nobody writing at a distance knows those things, and a stranger who hands you a course of action about people he has never met has given you something far more dangerous than a shape you noticed.

There is no confrontation in this message. There is no letter to write. There is nothing here to leave.

There is only this: you may put the lamp down. The thing you have been prosecuting yourself for was never a crime.

So hear this said over you, six months into suspecting yourself. You are not rebellious for noticing and you have not been carrying a wrong spirit, and the thing you saw is the thing that is actually there. That is written into a centurion who understood authority precisely because he was under it, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God rather than a suspect.