The Messages I Never Opened

There are forty one of them and she knows the exact number, which tells you she has looked.

They came in over one school year, from parents whose children she took for after school reading. Voice notes, mostly. One from a father who is not a talker and who recorded his forty seconds three times before he sent it, which you can hear.

She has opened none of them. Not one. She saw the previews as they arrived, enough to know what they were, and then she let them sit, and now they are a folder she scrolls past on the way to something else.

It is not that she thinks they are lying. That is the strange part. She believes every one of them is sincere. She simply cannot be the person on the other end of them.

Because opening one would be agreeing with it. And agreeing with it, in the arithmetic she has been running since she was a girl, is the beginning of thinking too much of yourself, which is the one thing she has organized her entire inner life to avoid.

So they sit there. Forty one of them. And she is tired in a way that has nothing to do with the reading group.

If you have a version of that folder, or a compliment you have never let land, then you know exactly what I mean. And it is quite possible nobody has ever told you that the refusing is not obedience.

The thing you were taught to avoid is not the thing you are doing

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting a long time for anybody to say it out loud.

Humility was never a matter of thinking poorly of yourself. It never was, not once, in any part of Scripture. Whoever handed you that handed it over meaning well, and it was wrong.

And it was not foolish of you to take it. I want to be exact, because nothing else will get in until it is said. You were given a rule by people you trusted, you kept it faithfully at real cost for most of your life, and keeping a badly worded rule is loyalty, not stupidity. There is nothing in it to be ashamed of.

Now here is what is going on in the room you are actually standing in, according to the word.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Read it slowly, because there are four verbs and every one of them is His and every one of them is aimed at you. He is mighty. He saves. He rests in His love. He sings.

You are being rejoiced over right now, and the singing did not stop while you were scrolling past a folder. That is not my sentiment about you. It is written in Zephaniah 3:17, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a person's ears into the place where they actually live.

And notice who is doing the work in that verse. Not one clause of it is about her performance. She does not sing. She does not save. She does not rest in her own love. The whole sentence is God being what God is toward somebody, and the somebody is simply there for it.

So the folder of forty one has not been humility. You have been declining something that was never yours to earn, and receiving it costs nothing and proves nothing. The word settled that before you were born, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

Deflecting is not the same as being lowly

Here is the distinction almost nobody draws for people like you, and it is the whole difference between a free life and the one you have been living.

A lowly person receives. That is what low is for. Water runs downhill and rests in the low ground, and the low ground is not doing anything clever; it is simply the place things arrive. The whole picture of grace in Scripture is downhill. Grace goes to the low place because that is where things land.

Deflection is not low ground. Deflection is a roof. It looks like modesty and it functions like a roof, and forty one messages have been running off it into the drain for a year.

You have not been proud. You have been protected from something that would have done you good. That is not a sin to repent of. It is a habit to put down, and the difference matters, because you have been repenting of your own hunger for years and it has not helped.

You have a place under the singing that was never conditional on how you take a compliment, and it is already yours. The word says He rejoices over you and rests in His love; His Spirit is the one who makes a line like that stop being a doctrine and start being an experience in a room with a folder in it.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room 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 asking 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.