The Last Time Cost Me Everything

It is a small thing. That is what makes it so strange to be sitting here unable to do it.

One message. One name in a phone. Three sentences at the outside, and the thing on the other side of it is not large and would not change anybody's life, and if it went badly the worst outcome is that it goes nowhere.

Her hand will not move.

She has been sitting at the kitchen table with the phone face up for about twenty minutes, and she has picked it up twice and put it down twice, and the second time she said something out loud that surprised her.

The last time she began something, it took four years to recover from. That is not a figure of speech and it is not self dramatizing. Four years, an actual count, with two of them being the sort of years people do not describe in company.

And here is the arithmetic she cannot stop running: a small beginning costs a small amount if it fails. Except that is not what her body believes. Her body has one price for beginning, and the price is the last one, and it charges that price at the door regardless of size.

The sentence at the table is not this might not work. It is: I cannot pay that again, and my hand knows it before I do.

You know that table. It might be a message, or a phone call, or an application, or a door. The thing itself is small and your body has priced it as though it were the last one, and no amount of reasoning with yourself has moved it.

The tense, and when it happened

There is one sentence in Paul that gets put on cards and read past, and everything in it is in the tense.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.2 Corinthians 5:17

Is. Not shall be. Not is becoming, gradually, if she keeps at it. He is a new creature, stated as a present fact about anybody in Christ, including a woman at a kitchen table with a phone she cannot pick up.

And are become new is past. It has happened. It is not waiting on her to do something brave in order to be triggered.

Which means the newness is not on the other side of the message. It is not the reward for pressing send. It was already true at twenty past eight while her hand was refusing to move.

You are already new, and the newness was never something a beginning was going to produce in you. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a woman at a table, and the Holy Spirit who is in you at this moment is the evidence that nothing about your standing is waiting on your hand.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic. If you are already new, then the price your body is charging at the door is information about four years, two of which nobody describes in company. It is not the thing that decides tonight, and it never had the standing to become that.

What this page is not going to do

Here is the second thing, and it is the reason you can stay on this page.

Nothing here is telling you to send the message. Not now, not tonight, not at all. If the phone stays face up on that table until you go to bed, nothing has been failed and nobody is disappointed, least of all God.

And nothing here promises that this one goes differently. Nobody knows. It might go nowhere. The person might not reply. That is a real possibility and pretending otherwise would make this page one more voice that costs you something later.

And nothing here tells you your body is wrong to charge the price it charges. It learned that price honestly. Four years is not a misunderstanding, and a system that flinches after that is a system that is working.

You have been carried through all four of those years, including the two that do not get described, and the carrying was never conditional on you attempting anything. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in you rather than waiting to see whether you press send.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a phone. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not sat with for twenty minutes at a kitchen table. And the thing in the way is not the message and it is not the person on the other end of it. It is a sentence: I cannot pay that again. 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 woman with any authority holding a phone she keeps putting down. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in whether the message goes.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than fear, 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.