I Have Rehearsed Being Turned Away

It has a location. That is the thing that unsettles her most when she thinks about it honestly, which is not often.

It takes place in a corridor. Not a dramatic one. It has the sort of floor that municipal buildings have, and there is a door at the end, and she is walking down it, and somebody comes out of the door and stands in the way, and there is a short exchange in which it becomes clear, very kindly, that there has been a misunderstanding about whether she was on the list.

She has run it perhaps a thousand times.

It started as an anxious thought and it has become something else, which is why she has stopped mentioning it to herself as a thought at all. It has details now. It has an ordinary quality that thoughts do not usually have. The person who comes out of the door is not frightening and has never been frightening; they are apologetic, which is far worse, and they say a version of the same sentence every time, and she knows the sentence.

She is forty-two.

She is entirely functional. She has a job she is good at and a small number of people she loves properly and a mountain she walks up twice a year with two friends, and she is, by most measures, well.

But there is a corridor in her, and it has been so well rehearsed that it now sits in the same drawer as things that happened.

And here is the exact place where the damage is done, and she has never said this out loud to anyone: she does not any longer experience it as a fear. She experiences it as information. As something she found out once, unpleasantly, and has been quietly organizing her life around ever since, the way you organize your life around any other unwelcome fact.

Nothing happened in that corridor

Let me start with the mechanism, because I think naming it plainly does more good here than anything gentle.

A scene rehearsed a thousand times acquires the texture of a memory. That is not a moral failure and it is not a sign of anything wrong with you; it is how the machinery works. Repetition builds the same kind of trace whether the source was an event or an imagination, and after enough repetitions the two are stored in a similar way and start to feel similar from the inside.

Which means the thing you have been treating as information is a very well-worn piece of fiction, and the reason it feels like information is not that it is true. It is that you have practiced it more thoroughly than most people practice anything.

Nothing happened in that corridor. Nobody came out of that door. There is no list and there was never a person with a clipboard.

Now here is what is actually on record.

If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.Psalm 130:3 and 4

Look at the first half, because it does something your corridor never does: it concedes the case. If God kept a record with intent, nobody stands. Not you specifically. Nobody. The psalm does not argue that the reader is better than they fear.

And then the turn. But there is forgiveness with thee.

Notice where the forgiveness is located. Not offered, not available, not obtainable under conditions. With thee. It is described as something God has, in the way a person has a quality, and the psalmist treats its existence as the decisive fact in the whole matter.

You are dealing with a God who has forgiveness with Him, and that is not comfort for a woman with a rehearsed scene, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the corridor rather than on the psalm you may well have read this year.

And look at the last clause, because it is strange and it is the key to the whole thing. That thou mayest be feared. The forgiveness exists so that God can be rightly held in awe. Not so that He can be taken lightly. The psalmist understands that a God who forgives is more awesome and not less, and that being received is not a lowering of the standard.

Now let me say something about the apologetic person at the door.

You noticed that they are kind, and that it is worse. That is a very exact observation and it tells me something: the scene is built to be unarguable. A frightening figure could be resisted. An apologetic one cannot, because there is nothing to push against, and the refusal arrives as regret rather than as judgment.

That is not the architecture of something that happened. It is the architecture of something constructed, over years, by somebody with a good imagination, to be impossible to answer.

You are not organizing your life around a fact. Scripture puts forgiveness with God as a possession, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept you functional and loving and walking up a mountain twice a year while a corridor ran underneath, and He has never once been the one running it.

And here is the last of it. You have never been turned away and there is nobody standing at that door. The word says who shall stand, and then answers its own question by locating forgiveness in God Himself, and the Spirit is the seal on it, and a scene practiced a thousand times has still happened zero times.

And if what is on you tonight is heavier than this, if it has got as far as not wanting to be here at all, please tell one human being tonight. A doctor, a crisis line in your own country, one person who can sit with you. That is not a detour from any of this. It is part of it, and you are worth the phone call.

You are dealing with a God who has forgiveness with Him, which is a possession rather than an offer on a table. The word asks who could stand if He marked iniquities and then answers itself, and the Holy Spirit has kept you loving and functional through every one of the thousand rehearsals.