I Cannot Show My Face

Two streets. That is the distance he has managed and it has taken eleven months.

He parks on the road behind the leisure center because there is a gap in the hedge there and from that gap you can see the corner of the building and the lit window on the first floor. He sits with the engine off. He has done this, on and off, maybe fifteen times.

He is not going in.

What happened is not a secret and there is no point being coy about it in a way that would make it sound worse. He went down, badly, in front of people he had been in a room with every week for nine years. Some of it was his own doing and he has never once said otherwise. Some of it was a set of circumstances that a fair person would call brutal. Both of those are true at the same time and holding both is a skill nobody teaches you.

The people in that room have not been cruel. Three of them still message him. One rings every few weeks and talks about nothing in particular for four minutes and then rings off, and that man has no idea what those four minutes are.

And still: two streets, a gap in a hedge, an engine off.

The sentence is not I am ashamed. Shame he could name. The sentence is: those people saw it, and there is no version of me that walks back through that door.

You know that sentence. It might be a church, or a family, or a workplace, or a group of friends who watched something happen to you or through you. There is a room, and there is a distance you get to, and the distance has become the fact you organize your life around.

Cast down, and the clause after it

There is a short line in a letter, written by a man who had been publicly humiliated more times than he could list, and it is four words long and everybody stops in the wrong place.

Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.2 Corinthians 4:9

Cast down. He does not soften it. He does not say it looked worse than it was. Paul had been thrown down in front of crowds who knew him, and he uses a word that means exactly that.

And then: but not destroyed. Notice what the second clause does not say. It does not say and I got back up. It does not say and I rebuilt my reputation. It is passive on his side and it names a fact about him that was true while he was still on the ground.

You are a man cast down and not destroyed, and the not being destroyed has never once depended on you walking back into anything. That is what the written word says over you and not a kind reading I picked for a man in a car park, and the Holy Spirit who is in you at this moment, two streets away with the engine off, is the evidence that the holding has been going on for all eleven months.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic. If the not being destroyed is His work, then eleven months and a gap in a hedge is information about how public it was and how deep it went. It is not information about whether you have been finished off, and it never had the standing to become that.

The door is not the test

Here is the second thing, and it is the reason this page will not do the thing being braced for.

The expectation is that all this ends with go in. Every article, every message, every well meant conversation for eleven months has been walking towards that sentence, and you can feel it coming from a page away, and part of you has already closed the tab in advance.

There is no such sentence here. Not now and not at the end.

Whether you walk through that door in November or in nine years or never is not what God's opinion of you turns on, and this site is not going to pretend otherwise to get a result.

You have been carried through every one of the eleven months, and the carrying did not weaken on the fifteen occasions you parked and drove home. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than standing at that lit window checking the car park.

There is one more thing, and it is worth saying without decoration. You said some of it was your own doing. Where that is true, the word of God has a specific and enormous provision for exactly that, and it is not a probation period. It is forgiveness, given whole, on the strength of what Christ did rather than on the strength of a rehabilitation you perform in front of witnesses. Whatever the room decides about you, that verdict came in a long time ago.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought in a parked car. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not sat with, fifteen times, behind a leisure center. And the thing in the way is not the people, three of whom still message you. It is a sentence: there is no version of me that walks back through that door. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority looking through a hedge. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much of yourself was behind them.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than shame, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.