It Would Sound Like Me

She has told it once, to her husband, in a car, in the dark, four years ago, and she has not told it since.

It is not complicated. She was in a place where there was no way through, and something happened that she cannot explain, and there is a woman alive today because of the thing she did at four in the afternoon on a Thursday, and she did not decide to do it and could not tell you where the decision came from.

That is the whole story. It takes about two minutes.

Twice in the last year somebody has said, in a room, does anybody have anything.

And she has felt it come up in her, the way you feel a wave lift a boat, and both times she has let it go past and looked at her hands.

Because the story has her in the middle of it. There is no way to tell it in which she is not standing right in the middle, doing the thing, and the moment she says it out loud in a room, forty people are looking at her and hearing what she did.

It would sound like her. That is the sentence she uses to herself, and it stops her every time.

If you have a story you have never told, you know exactly what I mean.

Whose story it is

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting four years for anybody to say it.

Silence is not automatically humility. There is a real quiet that comes from having nothing to prove and it is good. But a story kept in because you cannot bear to be looked at is not that, and the two get confused all the time.

Now look at what somebody said to a woman who was in exactly the position of being able to speak and did not want to be.

For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?Esther 4:14

Read the middle clause and read it slowly, because it is the mercy in the whole verse and almost nobody notices it. Deliverance will arise from another place. God is not stuck. He is not depending on Esther's nerve and the whole plan does not collapse if she stays quiet.

And then the question. Who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this.

Not a command. A question, put to a woman who was going to have to answer it herself.

You are in the room you are in on purpose, and the story you carry was put in your hands rather than picked up by you. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Esther 4:14, 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.

So four years of looking at your hands has not been humility. You have a story that is His work with your name attached to it, and telling it is reporting on Him. The word settled that on the Thursday it happened, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

The difference between a story about you and a story with you in it

Here is the distinction, and it is the whole practical use of this page.

A story about you is one where the point is you. It ends with the listener thinking well of the teller and that is what it was for.

A story with you in it is different. The point is the thing that happened, and you were standing there, and the telling requires you to be in the frame because you were in the frame. Removing yourself would not make it humble; it would make it false.

Every testimony in Scripture has somebody in the middle of it. The blind man says: I was blind, now I see. He does not manage to tell it without appearing.

And notice what happens when a story like yours is not told. The forty people in that room do not get it. Somebody in the third row who is currently in a place with no way through goes home without having heard that a way opened for somebody once at four in the afternoon on an ordinary Thursday.

That is the actual cost, and it does not land on you. It lands on the third row.

You have permission to stand in the middle of your own account, and the permission was given rather than taken. Esther 4 says deliverance will come regardless and still asks the question; His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to be looked at for two minutes without it costing them anything.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot speak is that somebody near you punishes you when you do, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Tell one person who can act. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour.