I Started To Think It Was A Defect

She caught it in a sentence she said to a doctor, of all people, about something unrelated.

She was filling in the background, the way you do, and she said: I have never really been part of anything properly.

And she heard it as it left her.

Never really. Properly. Two words that had not been there ten years ago.

Because ten years ago she would have described it entirely differently. She would have said: I am in two things, and I do not fit neatly in either, and it is a bit lonely and it is also quite interesting.

That is a description of a position. A place a person is standing.

And somewhere across ten years, without a single day where it changed, that description turned into a different one, and the new one is not about a position at all. It is about her.

Something in me does not attach. I am the sort of person who never fully belongs anywhere. There is a piece missing.

She said out loud in the car park, which is where these things happen: when did where I stand turn into what is wrong with me?

Nobody said it to her. Not one person, ever, in ten years. It assembled itself out of a thousand small Sundays, and by the time she noticed it was not a thought she was having, it was a fact she was working from.

You know that sentence.

Maybe yours came out at a doctor's, or to a friend, or in your own head at three in the morning. Maybe you have started to explain other things about your life with it. Maybe you have begun to expect it in advance, which is the stage after this one and it is worth catching before it arrives.

There is nothing wrong with you. That is what this page is about and it is worth having plainly at the start rather than at the end.

Who does the witnessing

Here is the sentence in the New Testament that settles the question of how a person knows what they are, and the striking thing is who is speaking.

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.Romans 8:16

The Spirit Himself.

Not a community. Not a track record. Not a sense of fitting in, not a feeling of belonging, not a run of Sundays where you felt part of something.

And notice the phrase: with our spirit. It is a joint testimony. Two witnesses, and one of them is God's own Spirit, and the thing being testified to is not how you are doing but what you are.

You are witnessed to by the Spirit Himself, and where you stand was never a diagnosis. That is what Romans 8:16 establishes, a testimony given about identity rather than about performance (Romans 8:16), and it is the Holy Spirit named directly in that verse as the one giving it, which means the question you have been answering with ten years of evidence was never yours to answer.

How a position becomes a verdict

Here is the mechanism, because seeing it helps and it is not a moral failing.

A person cannot experience a situation for ten years without starting to explain it. That is how minds work. And there are two available explanations for standing between things: this is where I happen to be, or this is what I am.

The first one is unsatisfying because it does not predict anything. The second one is enormously satisfying because it explains everything, including things it has nothing to do with, and once you have it you will find evidence for it constantly.

It is also not true, and it has been running your background for about four years.

You have not discovered something about yourself, and what you found was a story rather than a fact. Scripture says we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10), and read the word workmanship, which is a statement about manufacture, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a settled thing in a person rather than a compliment they have to keep believing.

And nothing here tells you to join something

Let me be plain, because the obvious prescription is available and it is not being made.

Nothing here says the answer is to commit properly to one of your rooms, or to throw yourself into something, or to stop being in between. That would be treating the position as the problem, and the position is not the problem, and a person who joins something in order to disprove a diagnosis carries the diagnosis in with them.

And nothing here promises that either room will one day feel like home.

You are not being told to move, and nothing about your standing is waiting on you attaching to anybody. The word says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind (Romans 14:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who does that persuading over years, which is why an article is not going to shortcut ten of them.