Told That Saying It Is Pride

A customer asked her last Tuesday whether the owner was in.

She was standing at the counter. She has been standing at that counter for nineteen years. Her name is on the paperwork, half of it, and she signed the lease alongside her brother in a lawyer’s office in a town forty miles away when they were both a great deal younger.

She said: I am one of them. And the customer said oh, sorry, and looked slightly embarrassed, and her brother came out of the back and the conversation continued with him.

That is the small version and it happens perhaps twice a month.

The larger version is that in nineteen years she has never once been introduced as an owner by anybody in her own family, and when she raised it, four separate times over eleven years, she was told each time in almost the same words that this is what pride looks like.

The last time was her aunt, who said it more gently than the others and did more damage.

So she stopped raising it. And what she has noticed since, and cannot say to anybody, is that she has also stopped correcting customers, and stopped standing at the front, and has begun to be the person they think she is.

If raising a thing has been treated as proof of the thing, this article is for you.

The move, named

Let me say it without hedging.

Saying it is pride is not an argument. It is a move, and it is the oldest one there is in rooms like that, and it works because there is no answer to it.

Watch how it operates. You state a fact: my name is on the lease and I have never been introduced as an owner. That fact is either true or false and it is easy to check.

But the reply is not about the fact. The reply is about you, and once the subject is your character there is nothing left for anybody to verify and no way for you to argue without appearing to prove it. Protest and you are proud. Accept it and the fact stands unaddressed.

There is no exit, and a claim with no possible exit was never a diagnosis. It is a lid.

Now read where God puts Himself in relation to somebody in that position.

The LORD also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.Psalm 9:9

The word behind refuge is a high place, a stronghold: somewhere a person goes when there is nowhere at ground level.

And notice the second half, which is the useful half. A refuge in times of trouble. Not afterward, when it has been resolved and everybody has agreed on the facts. In it.

You have a stronghold in this that is not made of anybody in that family agreeing with you, and it is available right now. That is not my opinion about your business. It is written in Psalm 9:9, 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 eleven years of not raising it has not been humility. You have a dignity God gave and no family can spend, and it is intact this evening. The word settled that before you signed anything, and the same Spirit who inspired it is behind that counter while you read this.

What has happened since you stopped

Here is the part you have not said to anybody, and it deserves to be looked at squarely because it is the most serious thing on this page.

You have stopped correcting customers. You have stopped standing at the front. You have begun, in your own account, to be the person they think you are.

That is not humility arriving. That is a person adjusting themselves downward to fit a description, which is what happens to anybody who is described the same way for long enough with no way to answer.

And notice the mechanism, because it lets you off. You did not decide to shrink. Nobody sat down and decided anything. You simply stopped doing a thing that had become expensive, four times over, and the stopping had consequences you never chose.

You have permission to state a fact about your own position, and stating a fact is not the same act as claiming a status. Psalm 9 puts God in the high place for somebody with nowhere at ground level; His Spirit is the one who lets a woman tell the difference between a diagnosis and a lid.

Now, plainly, and this is the part that matters most on this page. Nothing here is telling you to leave that business, and nothing here is telling you to stay in it, and nothing here is adjudicating your brother or your aunt, whom I have never met. I do not know your family, your finances, your history or what either choice would cost you, and a page that issued you an instruction would be pretending to knowledge it does not have. That is yours, and it belongs to the people who actually know your life, and to God.

What can be said is that you are allowed to get advice from somebody outside that family: a lawyer, an accountant, a business advice service, a friend with no stake in it. Finding out where you actually stand is not pride and it is not disloyalty. And if any of this 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.