It was announced from the front. Not cruelly. There was a form of words about a season concluding and thanks for years of service, and it lasted about forty seconds, and it was the first the room knew and the first she knew that they were going to say it that way.
She sat in the fourth row through it. She had not known where else to sit.
Afterward there was tea and everybody was extremely kind and nobody knew what to say, and about eleven people said something about being sure it would all work out.
Two of them said something else.
The first was in the parking lot. A woman she has known for nine years put a hand on her arm and said, warmly, that she believed God was humbling her, and that it would bear fruit.
The second was a text three weeks later. Same word. Humbling. With a verse under it.
She has not been able to put it down since. The removal she can survive; she has survived worse, and she is not naive about how these things go. It is the word. Because if it is true then the God she has served for nineteen years walked into that room and did that to her on purpose, in front of everybody, and she cannot get the shape of that to fit anything she knows about Him.
If somebody has told you what your worst season was for, you know exactly what I mean.
Nobody in that parking lot knew
Let me say the plain thing, and I will say it as somebody who also does not know.
That woman does not know what God was doing. Neither does the person who sent the text. Neither do I, and neither does anybody who was not in the counsel of the Almighty when it was decided, which is nobody at all.
They may have loved you. Almost certainly they did. What they gave you was not a message; it was a way of making an unbearable thing legible, and people reach for that the way they reach for a rail on a stair. The trouble is that they handed you the rail and it was attached to nothing, and you have been holding it for three weeks.
Put it down for ten minutes. It can be picked up again afterward if it turns out to be true. Nothing on this page depends on it.
Here is what can be said, and it is a location rather than a reason.
He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2
Read where God is in that sentence. He is not at the top of the pit calling down instructions. He is not the one who dug it. The verb is brought up, which means He came to where the person was, and that means He was in reach of the clay.
You are in a pit that God is already reaching into, and He did not dig it in order to have somewhere to reach. That is not my reassurance. It is written in Psalm 40:2, 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 the parking lot sentence is not the word of God to you. You have a God who came down where you are, and that is the whole of what can honestly be said about His position in this. The word settled that long before the announcement, and the same Spirit who inspired it was in the fourth row while it was read out.
Being humbled and being humiliated are not the same word
Here is a distinction this site exists to keep, and it is worth being exact about.
To humble oneself is something a person does. It is a posture, taken, on purpose, in the presence of God. Scripture asks for that constantly and it is a good and free act.
What happened to you in that room was not something you did. It was something that was done, in public, to somebody who was not consulted, and there is a word for that and the word is not humbling.
The two get conflated all the time and the conflation causes enormous damage, because it takes an injury and rebrands it as an instruction, and it leaves the injured person unable to grieve the thing without feeling that they are arguing with God.
You are not arguing with God. You have not been told what God was doing. You have been told what a frightened, kind woman in a parking lot guessed.
You have permission to grieve this as a loss rather than to receive it as a curriculum, and the permission is already yours. Psalm 40 has Him reaching into the clay; His Spirit is the one who lets a person put down an explanation without putting down their faith.
One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If the weight has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and if you are in danger right now, use your emergency number. And if any part of what happened involved somebody being harmed, nothing here is asking anybody to absorb that.
God is here on the floor with you, and He did not send you down to teach you something.
I am not going to improve on that sentence, because it is the whole article. Nobody has told you what God was doing. What is written is where He is: reaching, into clay, toward a person who is in it.
You are met exactly where you actually are, and He is not standing above this holding a lesson plan. Psalm 40:2 settled His posture long before that Sunday, and the Holy Spirit is holding it steady in you while you read the line.
And hear this, because it matters more than anything else here: nothing on this page tells you what will come of it, or when, or that a door opens. I am not authorized to say that. What He does next is His, in His own way. What is yours today is that you may put down a word that was handed to you by somebody who could not possibly have known.
Your part is to say where you are. His part is what He builds on it.
Declare this over yourself
Christ is in you and you are in Him, and that is the ground under these words rather than any role you held or lost. What He does next is His to decide, in His own way and at His own pace. Psalm 40:2 is the word underneath this, and His Spirit is the one who settles a spoken sentence in a woman who has been carrying somebody else's explanation for three weeks.
- Sentence somebody handed me in June, you are not the word of God and you are not staying. Scripture says He brought me up out of the pit and the miry clay, which puts Him reaching into it rather than standing at the top of it with instructions. Nobody in that parking lot was in the counsel of the Almighty, and I am putting their word down.
- Fear that grieving this would mean I am arguing with God, you are dismissed in the name of Jesus. To humble myself is a posture I take, and what happened in that room was done to somebody who was not consulted, and those are not the same word. Take your hand off my mourning.
- Lord, You came down to where I actually am and You did not dig this to have somewhere to reach. I am saying out loud today where I am and I am adding nothing at all about what it must be for. The reaching is Yours, the saying is mine, and I do not need an explanation in order to have You.
Psalm 40:2
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