The Mouth I Saw In The Mirror

Half past four on a Tuesday, and she has had two heads all day.

She sweeps anyway. Her own patch first, and then, because the brush is already in her hand, the bit under the chair next to hers, and she notices she is pushing it harder than the floor requires.

A woman comes in off the street without an appointment, wanting a trim, and asks her warmly how business is. She says fine. She says it in a voice she does not recognize, flat and closed and finished, the voice of somebody shutting a door with her foot because her hands are full.

She used to talk. That was the whole of it, the reason people booked her and came back and brought their sisters. She talked, and people left the chair lighter than they sat down in it. Now she does the hair and she does not do the talk, and lately she has caught herself resenting the ones who still want it.

At the end she wipes down the mirror. And there is her own mouth in it, set in a line she has never seen on herself before, and she looks at it a second longer than she meant to.

She still prays. That is the strange part. Every night, and it comes out flat and dutiful, like reading a list aloud to somebody who has left the room.

And there is a sentence she has never said to Him. It is not a nice sentence. It has been behind her teeth for two years, and she keeps it there because you cannot say a thing like that to God.

You have one too, or you would have closed this by now.

The sentence behind your teeth

I am not going to correct you. Not once, not gently, not at the end where the correction usually arrives.

You came here with something hard in you, and every other page has taken about four paragraphs to get round to telling you what the hardness is doing to your witness. This one will not, because I do not think that is what is wrong, and I do not think it is what God is looking at either.

You are met here exactly as you came in, and that is not my kindness, it is His. The written word says He knows what we are made of and remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and the Holy Spirit does not need you to be pleasant before He will stay in the room with you.

So let us start where it actually is. Long pressure hardens people. That is not a character flaw, it is what pressure does, and it has been on you for two years without a break in it.

The set of your mouth in that mirror is not a moral failure. It is a woman who has been holding something heavy for a very long time with nobody offering to take a corner of it.

God is not offended by hard words

Now I want to show you something in the book that I think has been kept from you, because it does not get preached much.

There is a whole man in Scripture who said the hard thing straight to God's face. Not politely. Not with the trust language on the front of it. He accused God of things, out loud, at length, in front of witnesses, and his religious friends spent chapters telling him to stop it and to say something more suitable.

And at the end of it, God turned to the friends.

And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these words unto Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.Job 42:7

The men who defended God with tidy answers got the correction. The man who said the raw thing to His face was the one who had spoken rightly of Him.

Sit in that for a second, because it means something for a woman at a rented chair with a sentence behind her teeth. You have God's own precedent for saying the hard thing to Him, in your own words, without softening it first. That is written down and it is not a loophole, and the Holy Spirit is the One who kept that chapter in the book so that people exactly like you would find it.

The softening is not a job on your list

Here is the part I most want you to hear, because I think it has quietly been added to a load that was already heavy enough.

Somewhere in these two years the softening became another job on the list. Late at night, after the flat prayer, with the mirror still in your head: trying to feel warmer than you feel, trying to want to feel warmer than you want to, failing at it, and then going hard about the failing as well.

Put that down. It was never your work. Look at who does the lifting in this promise.

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

Every single verb in that verse belongs to God. He gives, He puts, He takes away, He gives again. There is no clause in it where the stony heart has to soften itself first in order to qualify for the exchange.

You have a God who is already at work on what went hard in you, and He is doing it without an apology from you and without a better attitude from you first. That is the written promise, and His Spirit is the One carrying it out inside a woman who is currently sweeping harder than the floor requires.