Holding And Being Held

Yvette worked out that she was being held on a Sunday, and it took a stranger about eleven words to show her.

She had been describing something, cheerfully, the way she describes things, and she said a sentence that included a small aside about a thing she cannot do because of the one item she holds on to.

And the woman she was talking to, who does not know her well and had no history with any of it, said: does it not follow you around, that.

Yvette laughed. Then she went quiet for slightly too long, and then she said, honestly, "yes, actually."

Because it does. Once the question is asked properly it is not even a hard question.

That object shapes about eleven things in her life. It decides certain arrangements. It makes one kind of trip more complicated than it needs to be. There is a conversation she does not have because of it, and a decision she postponed for two years, and none of that had ever been added up in one place, because every individual effect was small and none of them looked like a consequence.

She has been holding it for a long time. It has also been holding her, exactly as long, with exactly the same strength.

That is the thing nobody tells you about a grip. It is a mutual arrangement. What you take hold of takes hold of you back, and it does not do it aggressively, and it never announces itself. It simply begins to set the shape of a week, and then a year, from inside a closed hand.

Now hear the thing that must be said before anything else.

Yvette is not foolish and she is not weak. This is a woman who runs things. Everybody in that hall eats because of her and she has held that place together through two hard years, and she is nobody's idea of a person who is easily led.

That is exactly why this went unnoticed for so long. Nobody looks for a small steering mechanism in a strong life.

You have your own version. There is something you hold, and if you sat with a piece of paper for ten minutes you could list the things it quietly decides, and the list would be longer than you expect.

Nobody is asking you for it, and I am saying that now, at the front. There is no ask at the end of this article and no plate anywhere on this site.

Hebrews separates two things that get preached as one

There is a verse everybody knows and almost nobody reads carefully, and the distinction in it is the whole point.

Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.Hebrews 12:1

Two categories. Every weight, and the sin. They are joined by an and, which means they are not the same thing, and the writer clearly expected his readers to be carrying items from both lists.

A weight is not a sin. That is the freeing part and it gets lost constantly. A weight is a thing that is not wrong at all and is simply heavy, and heavy is a problem of its own even when nothing has been broken. He is describing a runner taking off a coat, and a coat is not a crime.

So the question this verse asks about the thing in your hand is not is it wicked. It is a much better and much more answerable question: what is it costing me to carry.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are not being accused of anything. That is not my softening: the written word puts weights in their own category, separate from sin, in the same sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman sitting in a hall on a Sunday who has just gone quiet.

And the race is already set before you. The word says exactly that, set before, in the passive, meaning somebody else laid it out and it is already there, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real path under real feet rather than a metaphor about effort.

Nobody is asking you for anything

Now I am going to be as plain as I can be, because this is exactly the point where a message like this becomes a collection, and if it does that it has become the thing this whole site exists to refuse.

Nobody here wants your thing. Nothing is being asked of you at the end of this article. Nothing on this site is gated, nothing is held back behind a payment, and nobody is going to suggest that opening your hand is what makes you eligible to receive from God. If a page ever does that to you, close it and do not go back. That includes this one.

There is no plate. Not now, not later, not anywhere here.

And I am not going to tell you what to do about the object. Some weights are worth carrying and a person can decide, with a clear head, to keep carrying one. That is a real option and it is nobody's business but yours and God's.

And you are not being asked to be strong about this. The word says His strength is made perfect in weakness, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the strength rather than auditing yours, which means nothing here depends on how much resolve you can find on a Sunday afternoon.

What the grip is actually round

Here is the exercise worth ten minutes, and it does not involve letting go of anything.

Write down what it decides.

Not what it is. Not what it is worth. What it decides: the arrangements it shapes, the trips it complicates, the conversation it prevents, the decision it delayed.

Because that list is the actual grip, and until it is in one place it does not exist as a thing anybody can look at. Every single item on it is small. That is precisely how it has stayed invisible in a life run by a competent woman.

And then look at the length of the list rather than at any item on it. The length is the information.

And the freedom is already yours to walk in. Not once the list is shorter: the word says it is for freedom that Christ has set us free, and the setting free is in the past tense in that sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes a past tense verb into a present tense experience.