Sloppy.
She was twenty three. It was said in front of two other people by somebody who had a bad morning and probably forgot it by lunch. He is dead now. He was, by all accounts, quite a decent man.
She is forty two.
And if you took her working life apart and looked at what it is actually built out of, a startling amount of it is scaffolding around that one word. The checking. The second look. The way she cannot leave a thing until she has gone over it again, not because it needs it, but because of a feeling that arrives if she does not.
She would not say she is haunted by it. She hardly ever thinks of it. That is the strange part: it is not a memory she visits, it is a foundation she stands on, and you do not think about a foundation, you simply build on it.
Nineteen years of building.
And the work is excellent. That is not in question and nobody would question it. What it costs is not visible from outside, and she has never itemized it even to herself, and if she did the number would be alarming.
She has never told anybody the word. Not her husband. Saying it out loud would make it real and small at the same time, and she does not want either.
You may have your own word. Something somebody said once, that you would have to admit you can still hear, and a working life quietly organized around never hearing it again.
What He is doing over you
Here is a line that people find hard to believe about God, and I want you to sit in the strangeness of it rather than move past it.
The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17
He rests in His love. He sings.
That is not approval. Approval is what a person gives when the work meets a standard. This is delight, which is a different thing entirely, and it is not being given in response to output. It is described as His settled state toward the people it is written to.
And here is the part I want you to hold: it is the opposite kind of sound from the one that has been running your working life.
One word, said badly on a bad morning nineteen years ago, has been the audio track underneath your week. And Scripture describes a different sound, older and steadier, that has been going the whole time.
You have a sound over you that is not the one you have been building against. Zephaniah 3:17 describes God resting in His love and singing over His people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman of forty two hear a different track than the one from when she was twenty three.
Now I want to be very careful, because there is a version of this message that would do you harm and I am not going to preach it.
I am not telling you that your standards are the problem. They are not. You are excellent and the excellence is real and it is yours and it is worth having, and nothing here asks you to lower it or to care less. I am not treating your carefulness as a fault to be repented of, because it is not one.
The question is not whether to keep the standard. It is what the standard is standing on.
Work built on a word is exhausting in a way that never resolves, because the word cannot ever be finally disproved. Work built on being loved is the same work, done by a person who is not also defending herself every hour.
You are able to keep the whole standard and put down the defense, because they were never the same thing. The written word puts God's joy over you as a settled state rather than a response, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a standard from a scar in a person who has had them fused for nineteen years.
The honest half: the word will very likely still be there next year. Foundations do not come out in an evening and I am not going to pretend otherwise. And the man is dead and there is no conversation to be had and no apology coming.
What can happen tonight is that the word gets said out loud, once, and something older gets said after it.
The standard is yours and the defense is not required.
For nineteen years those two have been one object in you, so putting down the defense has felt identical to lowering the standard, and of course you would never lower the standard. Nobody ever showed you that they could come apart.
You are being sung over by God while you work, and that has been the case through every one of the nineteen years. Scripture describes Him resting in His love and joying over His people with singing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that the ground under a woman's excellence instead of a scar.
So the checking stays if you want it. What goes is the reason you have been doing it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud sitting on the edge of the bed, before the day starts. The standing to speak them is yours in Christ, given to you rather than earned, which is why a woman who has never told anybody the word can say it and then say this. Scripture is the ground under every line, the Holy Spirit makes it live, and what anybody ever thought of your work is His to decide about.
- Word said on a bad morning, you are not the foundation of my working life. Scripture says God rests in His love and joys over His people with singing, and there has been a different sound over me the whole time you were running underneath.
- Defense I have mounted every hour since, in the name of Jesus you come down. The written word makes God's delight a settled state and not a response, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been asking me to prove anything.
- Lord, You rest in Your love over me and You are singing, and I am standing on that instead of on a word. I thank You that Zephaniah 3:17 makes Your joy over me singing and never a review of anything, and I am saying the old word once and letting Yours be the one that stays.
Zephaniah 3:17
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