I Came Back After The Thing I Did

Three years back now, and she is going to say this once and then not dwell on it: she left badly, and it was her doing, and there were people hurt by it.

What she did is not the point of this page and it is nobody's business, and it has been dealt with in every way a thing can be dealt with. There were conversations. There was a long and genuinely humbling process. There was, at the end of it, a formal restoration that she did not think she would be offered.

And since then, three years of warmth.

She is not being frozen out. Nobody brings it up. There was a period at the start where it was slightly in the room and then it was not, and she has been treated, by everybody, exactly as she was before.

And she is standing in a hall in the middle of a celebration with a cake going through and children running the length of it, and she is carrying the thing she has carried every single day for three years.

She is here on a different footing now.

Nobody put her on it. There is no evidence for it and it contradicts everything anybody has done. It is simply what she believes about her own situation, and it has not moved in three years, and she has stopped expecting it to.

She has a speech, too. She has never delivered it. It sits ready, and it comes out in her head at odd moments, and it is about what she is and what she does not deserve and what she would be willing to accept.

What this page is not going to do

Let me say it plainly, because you have had three years of people being careful with you.

Nothing here is going to revisit what you did. It is not the subject and it will not be mentioned again.

And nothing here is going to reassure you that everybody has moved on. I do not know them and you have already predicted how that would land.

And nothing here is going to ask you to serve, commit, or take anything on to demonstrate anything.

You are not going to be handled here and nothing on this page makes anything you do the proof of your footing. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in a scene where a man does not get to finish a sentence, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman to have proved herself before He would deal with her.

He does not let him finish

Here is the scene, and the timing of it is the entire thing.

The son has a speech. It is in the text, twice. He composes it in the far country: I will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son, make me as one of thy hired servants.

That last clause is the one that matters. Make me as one of thy hired servants. He is not asking for restoration. He is proposing a lesser footing, and he is proposing it himself, and he has worked out that it is the most he can reasonably request.

He gets home. He starts the speech. He gets through the first two lines.

But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet.Luke 15:22

He never says the third line.

The hired servant proposal never leaves his mouth. The father interrupts him and calls for a robe, which is the garment of a son, and a ring, which is authority, and shoes, which servants in that house did not wear.

You have been living inside a speech that the father did not let a returning son finish, and the lesser footing in that story was the son's own proposal and it was refused before it could be spoken. I am not stretching that. Luke 15:21 has the speech cut short and Luke 15:22 has the robe called for immediately, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman standing in a hall during somebody else's celebration.

Nobody put you on it

Now the plain thing, and you have known it for a while.

Nobody in that building put you on a different footing. You said so yourself in the second paragraph of your own thinking. Nobody brings it up, nobody watches you, and the treatment has been the same as before.

The footing is yours. You composed it, the way the son composed his, in a far country, on the road home, working out what would be reasonable to ask for.

And it was a decent and humble thing to compose. That is the part nobody says. The son's speech is not arrogant. It is the honest proposal of a man who has done the arithmetic.

The father refuses the arithmetic. Not because it was wrong about the son's conduct. Because it was the wrong category entirely, and a father does not negotiate the status of a child.

You have been holding a proposal that has already been refused, and it was refused in the story before the words were even out. That is Luke 15 in its own sequence, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that building for three years and has not been operating a probationary arrangement.

The robe was not a reward

One more thing, and it matters for you specifically.

The robe does not come after a period of good behavior. There is no probation in that story. The son has been home for about ninety seconds and has said two lines and the robe is already being fetched.

Which means it was not earned by anything after the return, and cannot be strengthened by anything after the return either.

Three years of doing everything right has not improved your footing, because the footing was never a thing that responds to that. And, on the same logic, nothing you do next year could weaken it.

You are wearing a robe that was called for before you finished speaking, and nothing you have done in three years added to it and nothing could subtract. The word puts the robe in the first minute, and the Spirit who bears witness with our spirit is not keeping a separate record for people who came back.