The Story People Would Tell

She is not afraid of God. She has checked, more than once, and that is not it.

She is not afraid of the Holy Spirit either, in the sense of the doctrine or the person. She could give a clear account of what she believes and she would not flinch anywhere in it.

What she is afraid of is a sentence.

The sentence has a specific shape and she has heard versions of it her whole life. It begins did you hear what happened to and then her name, and it is said in a slightly amused voice, by somebody who was not in the room, to somebody else who was also not in the room.

That is the fear. Not the evening. The account of the evening, produced later, by a person with no obligation to be accurate, and traveling.

She is thirty nine and she has watched this happen to two other women. She could name them. In both cases what actually happened was, as far as anyone can establish, entirely fine and probably good. And in both cases there is now a version, and the version is what people know, and neither woman has ever been able to get out from under it.

So she has arrived somewhere without ever deciding to.

The sentence, if she said it out loud, would be: I want this and I am not willing to become a story.

You may know that fear. Not of what would happen, but of what would get said about it.

There is a promise pointed at exactly this

Most of the comfort people offer about this is useless because it addresses the wrong fear. They tell her God is safe, which she knows. They tell her nothing embarrassing has to happen, which is true and is not the point.

There is one line in a psalm that goes directly at the thing she is actually afraid of.

Yea, let none that wait on thee be ashamed.Psalm 25:3

Read what that verse is about. Not sin. Not failure. Public shame. Being made to look foolish for having trusted, which is a specific and social kind of hurt and it has its own vocabulary all through the psalms.

David asks about it constantly. He is a man with enemies who would enjoy a story about him, and a great deal of his prayer life is about not being handed to them, and God let him put that in the book.

You are afraid of something Scripture takes seriously enough to pray about, and Psalm 25:3 asks specifically that those who wait on God not be put to shame, and it is His Spirit who takes a line from a man surrounded by people hoping to tell a story about him and lands it on a woman of thirty nine.

Shame is a social word

Consider how carefully the psalms distinguish two things she has been running together.

There is guilt, which is about what a person has done. And there is shame, which is about being exposed to the view of others. They are not the same and the Bible does not treat them as the same. Whole psalms are about the second one with no reference at all to the first.

Which means her fear is not vanity and it is not a lack of faith. It is the thing David keeps asking about, and God did not tell him to grow up about it.

You have been carrying something the psalms treat as a real injury, because the written word devotes whole prayers to being kept from public shame rather than dismissing the worry, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from a dignified observation into permission to say it out loud.

And notice the condition attached in verse three. It is not the impressive who are promised this. It is those who wait. That is the whole qualification, and waiting is exactly what she has been doing for years while not asking.

You are already the person named in that promise, and Psalm 25 attaches it to waiting and to nothing more demanding than that, and the same Spirit who moved a hunted man to write it is the one who fills.

Nothing about the asking requires a room

Now the practical part, which is much simpler than the theology and will matter more to her today.

A story requires witnesses. There is no story available about a woman who asked God for something in her own kitchen with the door shut and nobody home. The two women she can name were in rooms, and the rooms are where the versions came from.

She has been treating a risk that belongs to one particular setting as a property of the thing itself. It is not. Nothing in Scripture attaches the filling to an audience, and nobody has to know she did it.

And it is worth being honest about why the two got fused in her mind, because it was not carelessness. Every account she has ever been handed came with a room attached, because rooms are where accounts come from. Nobody writes down the Tuesday when a woman asked God for something at her own sink and then went and collected a child from school. That is not a story, which is exactly what makes it available to her, and the absence of it from every account she has heard is a fact about storytelling rather than a fact about God.

You have a way to do this that no version of it can survive, because the written word never once makes a witness part of the transaction, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that not a dodge but an actual door.