She Still Introduces Herself by What She Left

It was a church supper and the woman across from her was new, and she said, "So tell me about yourself."

And Trina said, "Well, I came out of a situation about eight months ago."

And then everything after that, for about four minutes, was about the situation. What it was. How long. What it took. What it cost. She did not mean to. It came out in order, the way a story does when it has been told before.

And the woman across from her was kind and interested and said all the right things.

And Trina walked to her car afterward and thought: she asked me about myself.

She is forty-six. She has a job she has had for eleven years and is good at. She grows things. She has a daughter at college and a sister she talks to every day and a knee that gives her trouble and a favorite chair.

None of that was in the four minutes.

Here is the week it caught.

Her daughter, on the phone, said, "Mom, when people ask how you are, could you sometimes just say fine?"

And Trina said, "I do say fine."

And her daughter said, "You say fine and then you say considering."

You know that. You came out, and the coming out is the largest thing that has happened to you, and it has quietly become the whole of how you describe yourself, and somebody who loves you has started to notice.

Four names before the leaving

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to stop talking about it. That would be a cruelty and it would also be foolish, because that story is real and it belongs to you and there are people who need to hear it. I am not going to give anybody a verdict, and I am not going to tell you what is next.

What I will do is read you a verse everybody quotes and count the order it puts things in.

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.1 Peter 2:9

Count what comes first.

Chosen generation. Royal priesthood. Holy nation. A people for His own possession. Four titles, all of them positive, all of them about what a person now is.

And only after those four does the sentence mention the coming out.

You are given four names before the leaving is mentioned at all, and the order in that verse was not an accident. 1 Peter 2:9 puts the identity ahead of the deliverance in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that order off the page and into a church parking lot.

And look at what the coming out is for, in Peter's grammar. It is a purpose clause hanging off the four titles: that ye should shew forth the praises of him. The deliverance is not the identity. It is the occasion for something else.

You have never been defined by the thing you were brought out of, and the whole verse is arranged to prevent exactly that. It is written that they are a chosen generation before one word is said about darkness, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient ordering a present possession.

The story is real, and it is not the whole of you

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

Trina's four minutes were not vanity and they were not a fault. She has been through something and it is the biggest thing in the last decade of her life, and a person naturally leads with the biggest thing.

And there is a season, and it is a real one, where telling it is the work. Where saying it out loud repeatedly is how a person makes it survivable. I am not going to shorten that season for anybody or suggest it should already be over.

You are not being reprimanded for telling the truth about your own life, and Scripture never once treats a testimony as self-absorption. Revelation 12:11 speaks of overcoming by the word of their testimony, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a real account from being renamed as a preoccupation.

But here is what her daughter heard, and daughters hear these things first.

Fine, considering. Two words, and the second one drags the whole sentence back eight months. And what that does, over time, is quietly move a woman's center of gravity into the past, so that everything she is now gets described as a modification of what she was then.

That is not what Peter does. Peter starts with what a person is.

You are permitted a sentence about yourself that does not reach backward, and 1 Peter 2 models one in four consecutive titles. That is the verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a forward description honest rather than a performance.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the eight months have gone somewhere heavier than tiring, or if the telling has started to cost you more than it gives, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your sister, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about what you came out of. That is me refusing to leave you in that parking lot by yourself.