Getting Above Herself

She won a prize at school when she was nine. A book token and a certificate with her name written on it in real ink by somebody who had good handwriting.

Her mother put it on the mantelpiece. And an aunt came for tea on the Sunday, looked at it for a moment, and said to the room, not unkindly, in the voice people use for a joke that is not one: careful, that one will be getting above herself.

Everybody laughed. Her mother laughed. She laughed.

The certificate came off the mantelpiece within the month and nobody said why.

She is sixty one now. She has never once let a compliment land. Not from her husband in thirty eight years, not from her children, not from the woman she has worked beside since 2003 who told her last winter that she was the reason the department did not fall apart, and who watched her produce the small laugh and the small shake of the head and change the subject.

She would tell you, if you asked, that she does not think about that Sunday. That is true. She has not thought about it in decades. It does not need thinking about. It has been running perfectly well on its own since 1974.

If somebody hung a name on you once and you have been wearing it ever since, you know exactly what I mean. And it is quite possible nobody has ever told you the name is not humility.

What you were warned about is not what you have been doing

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting fifty two years for anybody to say it out loud in a room you were sitting in.

Humility was never thinking poorly of yourself. It never was. Whoever handed you that handed it over meaning well, or half meaning it, and either way it was wrong.

And it was not foolish of you to take it. I want to be exact about that, because nothing else gets in until it is said. You were nine, in a room of adults you trusted, and they laughed, and you learned the lesson faster than you have ever learned anything since. That is not stupidity. That is a child doing exactly what a child does.

Now read what God does about a name that has been hanging on somebody for a very long time.

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the LORD delighteth in thee.Isaiah 62:4

Hephzibah means my delight is in her. That is not decoration. God takes a place that has been called Forsaken, out loud, by everybody, for a long time, and He renames it in front of the same people, and the reason He gives is His own delight.

You have a name God gave you, and it is not the one somebody said over a mantelpiece in 1974. That is not my comfort. It is written in Isaiah 62:4, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

Notice that God does not argue with the old name. He does not hold an inquiry into whether Forsaken was fair. He simply renames, on His own authority, because the naming was never theirs to do.

So fifty two years of the small laugh has not been humility. You are called by His delight rather than by an aunt's joke, and the renaming is already done rather than pending. The word settled that before you sat at that table, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

A name you were given is not a fact about you

Here is the thing worth saying slowly, because you have never once looked at it directly.

That sentence was not a verdict. It was a woman in a small room being uncomfortable about a child's certificate, and it took her half a second, and she almost certainly forgot it by Tuesday.

You have carried it for fifty two years. And you have carried it so faithfully that you took it out of the room where it was said and applied it everywhere: to your husband, to your children, to a colleague in 2003, to a woman who wanted to thank you last winter and was not allowed to.

That is not pride and I am not calling it anything of the kind. Nobody is being diagnosed here. It is obedience to a sentence, and you have been an extremely obedient person.

You have been renamed by God, and the delight in the new name is His and not something you have to feel first. Isaiah 62 says the Lord delights in you; His Spirit is the one who takes a line like that off the page and puts it in a woman's chest at sixty one.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the house you are in. If part of the reason you cannot accept a kind word is that somebody near you punishes you for taking up space, nothing here is telling you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.