The Joy You Turned Down

Adaeze was told once, kindly, by somebody who meant well, that she came across as a bit much, and she has been running at about sixty per cent for eleven years.

It was not cruel. That is the part worth sitting with. The person who said it was fond of her and was genuinely trying to help her get somewhere, and the advice was practical and it worked. She dialled it down and the room took her more seriously and doors opened that had not been opening, and by any reasonable measure it was good counsel that produced good results.

She would still tell you it was good advice. She would say it without bitterness, because she has none.

But she was in a car park last spring, on her own, waiting for somebody, and a song came on that she had not heard since she was twenty-three. And she did the thing. The whole thing, in a stationary car, with the wheel, and the shoulders, and the bit where the head goes back.

And when it finished she sat there in the quiet and thought: where does that live now?

Because it does not live in the rooms. It does not come to the table. It comes out at home, sometimes, and it comes out with two specific friends, and everywhere else there is a version of Adaeze who is warm and competent and well liked and about sixty per cent.

Nobody asked her to keep it at sixty. That is the part that got her. One person, eleven years ago, made one observation, and she set a dial and then forgot there was a dial, and every year since she has been quietly paying the difference to a room that never once sent an invoice.

Now I want to say something plainly before we go on, because this is where a message like this can turn into a lecture about being your authentic self, which is not what this is and would not help you anyway.

Adaeze was not wrong to adapt. Wisdom knows what a room can carry. There is a real gift in reading a table, and a person who cannot do it is not free, they are exhausting, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

That is not what happened here.

What happened is that a temporary adjustment for one room became a permanent setting for all of them, and nobody ever went back to check whether it was still needed.

You have your own version. It might not be gladness. It might be the way you talk, or the thing you find funny, or how much you actually love what you love. There is something in you that got turned down for a specific room at a specific time, for a reason that was genuinely sound, and it has never once been turned back up, anywhere, since.

Nobody is calling you a fake. You are not performing and you have not lost yourself.

Something was sold, and it was sold for credibility, and credibility is the one currency nobody ever thinks to count.

Conformed is a passive verb, and that is the whole clue

There is a famous line about this that gets read as a warning against the world and is actually a warning about a process.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.Romans 12:2

Hear the grammar, because the grammar is the teaching. Be not conformed. It is passive. It is a thing that happens to you, not a thing you do, and it happens by pressure over time rather than by decision, which is exactly why nobody can name the day.

Nobody in that verse is being accused of defecting. They are being warned about a shape they will take if nothing resists it, the way water takes the shape of whatever it is left in overnight.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are already transformed, and the renewing is His work and not yours. That is not my flattery: the written word puts the transforming in the passive as well, done to you rather than achieved by you, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who does the renewing, which means you are not being sent away to manufacture a personality.

And the gladness in you is His. Not a temperament you happen to have, and not a phase you should have grown out of at twenty-three: the word says the joy of the Lord is your strength and that the fruit of the Spirit is joy, and it is the Spirit Himself producing it, which is why eleven years at sixty per cent never once managed to kill it.

That is what the car park proved. It is all still there.

What is not being asked of you

Now I am going to be very clear, because this is the paragraph where a message like this starts writing checks the reader has to cash.

Nobody here is telling you to walk into that room tomorrow and be the whole of yourself at volume. That would be a foolish thing for me to ask, because I do not know your room, I do not know what it costs you, and I am not the one who has to sit in it on Monday morning.

Nobody is telling you to make a point, or to explain yourself to anybody, or to announce that you have been holding back for eleven years. Nothing about this requires a single other person to be told anything at all.

And there is nothing wrong with reading a room. Wisdom is not the enemy of gladness. A woman who knows what a table can carry is not a woman who has sold something; she is a woman doing something skilled.

So hear what is not required. You do not have to prove this to anybody. Nothing in Scripture makes your standing depend on how you come across, and the Spirit of God has never once assessed a daughter by how a room received her.

And the eleven years are not wasted. He restores the years the locusts ate, says the written word, and the Spirit is entirely able to hand a woman back at forty something she thinks she left at twenty-three, and to make it better for having been carried a long way in the dark.