The Thing I Did Not Choose To Feel

It was one second long and she has thought about it for a year.

A documentary, on in the background, about a community somewhere she has never been, keeping something old on a day she has never kept. And she was folding washing and half watching.

And a thought went through her, complete, in about a second, and the thought was: they are still waiting.

That is all. Six words, gone as fast as they came, and underneath them a small warm feeling of being further along.

She put the washing down.

Because she knows what that was. Nobody had to explain it to her. She has never in her life said an unkind word about anybody in that documentary or anybody like them, she would be horrified to be thought of as the sort of person who does, and there it was anyway, warm and unearned and entirely her own.

And here is the part that has kept her up. She cannot get rid of it by disagreeing with it.

She has tried. She has told herself the correct things. She has read around it. And the correct things sit on top like a sheet over furniture, and the shape underneath does not change, and every so often something on a screen or a sentence in a conversation lifts the sheet for a second and there it is.

You know that second.

Maybe yours arrives about a different group. Maybe it is a denomination, or a country, or people who believe an older thing or a newer thing. Maybe it is so small and so quick that you have never held still long enough to look at it.

And you did not choose it. That is what makes it so difficult to shift and so unfair to be ashamed of. It came in with the air.

The passage saw you coming

Here is the strangest thing about this ache, and it should be a comfort before it is anything else.

The chapter that hands a person like you their place in the tree is the same chapter that turns around, mid sentence, and addresses this exact feeling directly, as though the writer knew it would arrive.

Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.Romans 11:18

Read what he does not do there.

He does not say you are a bad person. He does not tell the reader to feel worse, or to examine themselves harder, or to work up an attitude of humility. He does not moralize for one clause.

He states a fact about load bearing.

You are not carrying this. The thing underneath you is carrying you. That is not an instruction and it is not a rebuke, it is a description of which way the weight is going, and it is the only thing in the whole passage aimed at the feeling you found in your washing basket.

You are being carried, and every ounce of what you have is arriving through something you did not build. That is what the verse says in the plainest possible terms, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee (Romans 11:18), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the life moving up through it, which means the strength you have been quietly proud of is on loan from a source you did not make and cannot maintain.

Why arguing never worked

Now here is why the correct things sat on top like a sheet.

A superiority is not an opinion. It is a posture. It is what your body does when it estimates where it stands relative to somebody else, and it happens well below the level where arguments operate, which is why you can hold entirely correct views and still get the warm second in front of a documentary.

You cannot argue a posture down. You can only change what it is standing on.

You have not failed at humility, and there was never a version of trying harder that would have worked. Scripture says it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure (Philippians 2:13), and it is the Holy Spirit doing that working, on the inside, at the level where a posture lives, which is precisely where your effort has never been able to reach.

And I want to say this as plainly as I can, because you have been carrying a year of quiet shame about one second of your life. You are not condemned, and the fact that you saw it at all is not evidence against you. The word says there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and His Spirit is the one who showed you the thing in the first place, gently, in your own front room, which is not how an accuser works.

An accuser shows you a thing to bury you under it. He showed you a thing so that you would put the washing down.

Nothing here is being decided

And nothing on this page rules on anybody in that documentary, or on what they keep, or on what anybody waits for. Not one word of it, in any direction.

That is not a dodge. It is the whole point of the passage: the correction Paul makes is not to hand the boasting branch a better argument about the other branches. It is to take the branch's attention off the other branches entirely and put it on the root.

You have been handed a direction to look rather than a case to win, and looking down is the whole of the instruction. Scripture says thou bearest not the root, but the root thee (Romans 11:18), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the life coming up through it, which is why attention on the root settles something that argument never reaches.