Precious In My Sight Before The Work

She is the best at it. Not in a bragging sense: it is simply true, and the people around her know it, and it is why she is where she is.

And she is frightened all the time.

Not of anything specific. There is no threat and nobody has said anything and by any reasonable measure she is completely secure. The fear is more structural than that: she can feel, at all times, exactly what is holding her up, and what is holding her up is that she is very good, and being very good is a thing that has to be renewed continuously.

She is twenty nine. She has been excellent since she was about twenty two.

The bad weeks are not the bad ones. The bad ones are the ordinary weeks, where she does perfectly good work that nobody would remark on in either direction, and something in her starts counting.

Two ordinary weeks and there is a hum. Three and she stops sleeping properly.

She could not tell you what she thinks happens if the hum turns out to be right. There is no scene at the end of it. There is only a certainty that the floor is made of the last thing she did, and floors made of that need relaying every week for the rest of her life.

You may know that hum. Not a fear of failing, exactly. A permanent awareness of what is underneath you and how often it needs replacing.

Precious, and the word is not about performance

Here is a sentence God says, and I want you to notice that it contains no assessment.

Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honourable, and I have loved thee.Isaiah 43:4

Precious in my sight.

That is a valuation, and valuations are usually about worth demonstrated. But look at the shape of it: since thou wast precious. It is not describing something achieved. It is describing something that was already the case, and everything else in the sentence follows from it.

And it is spoken to people who were, at that exact moment in their history, comprehensively not distinguishing themselves. There is no reading of that chapter where they are being commended for a good quarter.

You are valued at a level that was never a report on your performance. Isaiah 43:4 says precious in my sight before it says anything about anything else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts that under a woman whose entire floor is made of her last piece of work.

Now I want to say something about excellence, because there is a lazy version of this message that would insult you and I am not going to preach it.

I am not going to tell you to stop being the best. Your excellence is real, it is yours, it cost you something, and it is a good thing rather than a symptom. Nobody is asking you to care less or to become average as a spiritual exercise. That would be a foolish thing to ask and you would rightly ignore it.

The trouble is not the excellence. It is that the excellence is load bearing, and it was never designed to be. It is a thing you do. It is not a thing that can hold a person up, because it has to be produced again next week, and next week, and forever, and no human being can sustain a floor that has to be relaid weekly for forty years.

You are standing on something that does not need relaying, and it was underneath you before you were good at anything. The written word puts precious first in the sentence and lets everything else follow, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person a floor that is not the last thing they made.

The honest half. The ordinary weeks will still come and the hum will probably still start. I am not promising you a mind that stops counting.

What is on offer is a different answer to the hum. Right now the hum asks what is holding you up and the honest answer you have is: the last piece. There is a truer answer available and it does not change from week to week.

And there is a part only you can do, and it is uncomfortable on purpose, because comfortable versions have not reached this. You say out loud what happens if the next one is merely adequate. And then you say what is still true. In that order.