I Did Not Agree To Become This

Ten past three on a Saturday, and the covered market has the sound it makes now, which is one radio and nobody's feet.

The unit opposite has been shuttered since spring. Somebody taped a laminated notice about the redevelopment to the roller and the notice has gone curly at one corner.

She has had this pitch for nineteen years. Zips, thread, buttons on cards, elastic by the meter, and the good scissors kept under the counter for the ladies who know to ask.

A woman comes down the aisle, picks up a reel, turns it over, photographs the label with her phone, puts it back on the pile and says thank you, love, on her way out. That has happened four times this week. She stopped counting a while ago.

Her hands are cold. The heating in here was never much and it is less now.

At half three she starts folding the felt squares, which do not need folding, and she hears herself think it, whole and fully formed, the way it has arrived every Saturday for about a year:

I have done everything right in here for nineteen years and I am watching it go, and I have asked You about it more times than I can count, and I have gone hard in here, and I did not agree to become this.

She would not say that out loud. Not in the market, not at home, and certainly not on a Sunday.

That sentence is in you as well. So we are going to go and get it out, and nobody is going to tell you off for it.

The name she gave herself

There is a woman in the Bible who said your sentence out loud in the middle of a public road, and I want you to see exactly how God handled it.

Naomi went out from Bethlehem with a husband and two sons and came back with neither. When she walked into the town the women recognized her and called her by her name, and this is what she said back to them:

And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.Ruth 1:20

Her name, Naomi, means pleasant. Mara means bitter. She is doing something in Hebrew that does not survive the crossing into English: she takes the name her mother gave her, holds it up in public, and swaps it for the truth. Do not call me pleasant. Pleasant is not what I am now.

And look at who she names. Not the famine, not Moab, not the road, not her luck. She says the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me, and the verb she uses, hemar, comes from the same root as the name she has just given herself. She has become, in her own telling, the thing she says He did.

So hear this over a folding table at half three. You are allowed to be exactly this honest in front of God, and being this honest does not put you outside anything. Ruth 1:20 stands in the written word with her sentence intact and unedited, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that it stayed in, thirty centuries deep, so that a woman going cold in a market aisle would find her own words already in the Book when she got there.

Nobody in the book tells her off

Now read what happens next, slowly, because what is not there is the whole point.

Nobody corrects her. Not Ruth, who is standing right beside her and has just made the most loyal speech in the Old Testament. Not the women of Bethlehem. Not the narrator, who could easily have added half a line to keep the rest of us straight, and does not. Not God, who says nothing whatsoever about it anywhere in the book.

The bitterness is recorded, and then the story simply carries on. That is not an oversight. Hebrew narrative is extremely economical with words, and what it leaves standing without comment, it leaves standing on purpose.

She is not the only one, either. Job said I will speak in the bitterness of my soul (Job 10:1), and at the end of that book God's verdict was that Job had spoken of Him rightly. Hannah prayed in bitterness of soul (1 Samuel 1:10), and the priest watching her assumed she was drunk, and he was the one who had misread the room.

You are not being assessed while you say it. The written word keeps a long and unembarrassed record of people saying hard things straight at God and walking away unharmed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who preserved every one of those sentences rather than quietly editing them out.

I am staying in chapter one

You may well know how the book of Ruth ends. I am not going to use the ending on you.

Nobody handed Naomi chapter four while she was standing in that road in chapter one. She did not have it. What she had was an empty road, a foreign daughter in law and a sentence about the Almighty, and that was the whole of her position, and every word of it was true when she said it.

Using somebody's ending to hurry them out of their beginning is one of the unkindest things done in churches, and it is almost always done warmly. So we are staying here. I do not know what your chapter four says. I am not going to invent one and hand it to you at half three on a Saturday.

What I have for you is chapter one, and chapter one turns out to be enough to stand on. You are held right here, in the part with no resolution anywhere in it, because Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the Holy Spirit does not wait at the far end of a story for a person to arrive in better condition.

He is softening it, and He is not waiting for an apology

Here is what I can say next, and I can only say it because it is written down.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

Read who does the work in that sentence. Every single verb belongs to Him. He gives, He puts, He takes away, He gives again. There is not one clause in it where the person is required to soften themselves first as the condition of being softened, and there is nothing in it about being sorry for having gone hard in the first place.

So this is yours while you are still hard. You have a God who is at work on the stone rather than standing outside the door waiting for it to turn to flesh on its own, and that is His written word and not my optimism, and the new spirit named in that verse is His Spirit rather than a better mood you are expected to manufacture on a cold Saturday.