I Will Not Make You Loud

She has been sitting at the back for eleven years. Not out of shyness exactly. She would say it is more like being in a place where she can see the whole room.

From the back she has watched a great deal.

She has watched women she respects go down on their knees and stay there. She has watched a man she has known for twenty years, an accountant, a person of enormous reserve, put his hands over his face and shake. She has watched people cry out in a way she could not do if you paid her.

And she does not think any of it is fake. That is important. She is not sitting at the back being superior. She believes those are real people having something real happen to them, and part of her aches over it in a way she has never described to anyone.

She has also, over eleven years, arrived at a conclusion. It has never been said out loud and it runs her whole life on this subject.

The conclusion is that being filled means becoming one of them.

Not becoming like them in general. Becoming the version of herself that behaves that way. And she has looked at that version and she does not recognize her, and she is not willing to be handed over to her, and so she sits at the back and she watches and she wants it and she never once opens her hands.

The sentence, unsaid, would come out like this: if that is what He does to a person, then He would have to do it to somebody who is not me.

You may know that seat. The wanting and the watching and never the asking.

Self control is on the list

There is a list in Galatians of what the Spirit of God produces in a person, and it is worth reading slowly, because the last item on it is the exact thing she is afraid of losing.

Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.Galatians 5:23

Temperance in older English is self mastery. Self control. The capacity to have your own hands and your own voice and to decide what they do.

That is not something the Spirit is described as removing. It is something the Spirit is described as producing. It sits on the same list as love and joy and peace, in the same sentence, as an outcome of the same work.

You are being offered more of the thing you thought was at risk, and Galatians 5:23 names self control as fruit of the Spirit rather than a casualty of Him, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a list written to a confused church and lands it on a woman at the back of a hall.

The list is about what grows, not about a scene

Consider what kind of list that is, because it changes the whole picture.

Fruit is not a manifestation. Nobody watches fruit happen. It is what a tree turns out to be producing over a season, and every item on Paul's list is a quality of character rather than an event in a room.

Which means the Spirit's signature, in the one place Scripture actually catalogs it, is not a set of behaviors an observer would notice on a Sunday. It is love, patience, kindness and a person in possession of themselves.

There is something almost funny about that once it lands. The one inventory God gives of His own work in a person contains nothing that would show up on a recording. A room full of people could be full of it and an observer at the back would see nothing but a group of unusually patient adults being kind to each other, which is not what anybody photographs.

And she has been at the back for eleven years running a visual inspection for something that was never going to be visible.

You have been watching for the wrong signature entirely, because the written word lists character and never once lists a scene, and His Spirit is what turns that from a technicality into the moment a woman at the back can finally exhale.

And notice the last clause, which is a small joke and a large kindness. Against such there is no law. Nobody ever had to make a rule against too much self control. Paul is quietly noting that these outcomes never need policing, which is the opposite of a warning about people getting out of hand.

You were never going to need policing, and Galatians 5 ends the list by observing that nothing on it has ever required a rule, and the same Spirit who produced that list is the one who fills.

The people she has been watching are not the standard

Now the delicate part, because she has real respect for those people and nothing here is going to take a shot at them.

The accountant with his hands over his face was having something real happen to him. So were the women on their knees. This is not a debunking, and if she came away thinking less of them the article would have failed.

What is being removed is only the inference. She watched eleven years of other people and built a specification out of it, and a specification built from observation is not a promise from God. The people she has been watching are accounts, and accounts are not conditions.

You were never looking at a requirement, because Galatians 5:23 gives the actual list and self control is on it, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that a relief rather than a rebuke to eleven years of careful watching.