Celebrated In Public, Certain In Private

The clapping is the worst part. She has never been able to explain that to anybody.

People are kind to her. People are generous and specific and they mean it, and they come and find her afterward to say what something did for them, and she thanks them and she means that too.

And underneath the whole of it runs a sentence she has carried since she was about twenty three: He is disappointed in me.

Not condemned. She would push back hard on anybody who told her she was under condemnation, and she could take that apart from Scripture in about a minute. Disappointed is a subtler thing and it lives further down. It says: He knows the whole of it, and He is making the best of what He has got, and the room does not know what He knows.

So the more a room gives her, the louder the sentence gets, because every kind word widens the gap between what they see and what she is certain He sees.

If you carry something like that home from good rooms, come and sit down with me. Nothing about your private list is being asked for tonight.

Disappointment is not one of His postures

Let us take the word itself and hold it up, because it has never been examined.

Disappointment requires an expectation that was not met. It belongs to somebody who hoped for a certain outcome and got a lesser one, and it depends entirely on not having known in advance.

Now put that word next to God, who knew every single thing about you before He called you, including all of what the room does not know. There was no revised estimate. There was nothing He found out later.

That word cannot attach to Him. It is a human posture and it has been dressed in His clothes and worn for two decades.

You are not a disappointment to the Father. Nothing He knows about you arrived after He chose you, and no room's opinion is closer to the truth than His. I am not saying it for comfort. The written word says he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), which puts the choosing before anything a person could do or fail at, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who makes that hold in a woman driving home from a good night.

The comparison He actually makes

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a way of arguing with the sentence.

Jesus is praying, out loud, the night before He dies, and He says something about His people that is almost too much to read straight.

I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.John 17:23

As thou hast loved me. That is the comparison. He puts the Father's love for His people alongside the Father's love for Him, and He does it in prayer, where a man is least likely to be exaggerating for effect.

Whatever was in the sentence spoken from that opened sky over the Son, He is asking that it be understood as covering the ones He is praying for.

You are loved on the terms He is loved, and the Word puts that comparison in His own mouth in prayer. That is written down as an intercession the night before the cross, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who makes it land in a woman with a sentence running under every kind word.

The room is not the point either

Something has to be said, because the temptation now is to start believing the room instead, and the room is not a reliable instrument either.

They see what they see. It is partial and it is generous and it is not the truth about you in either direction. Swapping a private verdict for a public one is not freedom, it is a change of judges.

You have a word spoken over you from outside every room, and it does not move with an audience. Scripture says the LORD seeth not as man seeth (1 Samuel 16:7), which cuts against the flattering read as firmly as the harsh one, and the Holy Spirit is the one that has held the actual verdict steady for twenty years while two wrong ones argued.

And if this has cost more than anybody in that building knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please tell somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.