They Already Think I Am Too Much

She was nine the first time somebody said it, and she remembers the room.

An aunt, not unkindly, said she was a bit much, and everybody laughed including her mother, and she laughed too, and then she went and sat on the stairs for a while and worked out what had happened.

She is thirty six now and the word has followed her the whole way. Nobody uses it to her face any more because she is an adult with a job and a life, but she can hear it under things. She hears it in the pause before somebody agrees with her. She heard it very clearly last year when a woman she had thought was a friend described her at a table as a lot, in a good way, and the room laughed, and she laughed.

Here is what she wants and has never asked for.

She wants to be filled with the Holy Spirit. She has wanted it since she was about twenty and she means it in the deepest part of herself, and she has read about it and thought about it and prayed around the edges of it for sixteen years.

And she cannot ask, and the reason is one she has never said and would find humiliating to say.

If she asks, and anything at all happens, and anybody sees, she already knows what will be said. Not that God did something. That she was being herself again. Sixteen years of wanting, held shut by a sentence she can hear in advance in a voice she can identify.

It goes: oh, that is just her.

You may know that word. The one they have been using about you long enough that it now decides what you are allowed to ask for.

Somebody said it to a king and God took his side

There is a scene in the middle of the book of Samuel that is about exactly this, and it is not usually taught as being about exactly this.

David brings the ark up into the city and he dances the whole way. Not decorously. The text says he danced with all his might, in front of everybody, and his wife watches from a window and despises him for it, and when he gets home she meets him at the door with a sentence.

She says he uncovered himself in the eyes of the servant girls, and the sentence is designed to land where it lands, which is on his dignity in front of people who work for him.

And this is what he says back.

And I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight.2 Samuel 6:22

He does not defend himself. He does not explain that it was the Spirit or that it was appropriate to the occasion. He simply refuses to accept her as the person who gets to grade it, and the narrative does not correct him.

You are not the first person to be graded by somebody at a window, and 2 Samuel 6:22 has a man refusing to let an observer set the standard, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a scene at a doorway three thousand years ago and lands it on a woman who was nine in somebody's front room.

The grading is the thing being refused

Consider carefully what David is and is not saying, because the difference matters for her.

He is not saying he was right and she was wrong about what it looked like. He does not litigate the appearance at all. He is saying something more radical, which is that her assessment is not the assessment, and that he is willing to go further in the same direction rather than negotiate.

That is not defiance for its own sake. It is a man declining to hand the authority over his own worship to somebody who was not in it.

You have handed the grading to people who were never given it, because the written word records a man refusing exactly that transfer and God does not rebuke him for it, and the Spirit of God is what turns a scene in a book into something she can act on tonight.

And notice where the story goes next. There is no verse where God tells David he overdid it. Nothing anywhere in the account suggests the dancing was a mistake, and the chapter ends with the woman at the window rather than with him.

You were never going to be assessed by the person at the window, and 2 Samuel 6 leaves David uncorrected and the objection unendorsed, and the same Spirit who moved a king to dance is the one who fills.

Nothing has to be visible at all

Now the practical thing, which will matter more tonight than the theology.

She has been picturing this in a room with people. That is where she has always seen it and it is where the sentence she dreads would be produced. But there is no room in the requirement, and the whole dread depends on an audience she does not have to have.

She can do this alone. Nobody will have an opinion, because nobody will be there to have one, and no version of the evening can be filed under her personality by anybody.

You have a way to do this where nobody gets a vote, because Scripture attaches no witness to the transaction at any point, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that not a compromise but the plain shape of the thing.