Shine on Your Servant

Everybody is very kind to her and she has begun to find it unbearable.

She could not say that out loud anywhere. It sounds monstrous. People are kind. They ask after her. They say things like, we do appreciate you, and they mean it.

But she has developed an ear, over eleven years, for a particular register, and she hears it now in almost every conversation she has in that building. It is the register of people being careful with somebody. Slightly warmer than normal. Slightly slower. The tone you use with a person who is doing a difficult job that you are glad is not yours.

And she cannot tell, any more, the difference between that and love. They sound the same from the inside. Both are gentle. Both involve somebody being nice to her. And she is forty-four and she has spent eleven years being handled kindly, and she has begun to suspect that God is doing the same thing.

Not angry with her. Never angry. Patient. Considerate. Slightly warmer than normal, because she is doing a difficult job.

She said something close to this to a friend once, and heard how it sounded, and turned it into a joke halfway through the sentence.

Patience and shining are two different faces

Make thy face to shine upon thy servant: save me for thy mercies' sake (Psalm 31:16).

I want you to notice something about that request, because you would never have made it and the psalmist does not hesitate.

He does not ask God to be patient with him. He asks for the shining face.

And those are two different things, and it matters enormously that they are, because you have been living inside the first one and calling it the second. A patient face is a face that is waiting for something. A shining face is a face that has already got what it wanted, which is you.

You are being shone on and not merely put up with. The word asks for exactly that and asks for it without embarrassment, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that distinction land in a woman who has lost the ability to tell warmth from management, because Scripture calls Him the Comforter and comfort is not a synonym for careful handling.

What eleven years does to an ear

Let me say something about how you got here, because you are not paranoid and you are not ungrateful.

Your ear is accurate. That register is real, and you are not imagining it, and a great many people who are kind to you are also, in a way none of them would recognize, being careful with you. That is what happens to a person in a role. It is nobody's fault and it is not going to change by being complained about.

The damage is not the register. The damage is that a person who has heard nothing but careful warmth for eleven years loses the calibration for the other kind, and then applies the miscalibrated ear to God, who is the one relationship in the universe where none of it applies.

You are not being managed by God and you never have been. Scripture says God so loved the world that He gave (John 3:16), and giving is not the behavior of somebody being careful with you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who retunes an ear that has been listening to one register for a decade.

For Your mercies' sake

Look at the second half of the verse, because it names the reason, and the reason is not you.

Save me for Thy mercies' sake.

Not: save me because I have earned it. Not: because I am doing a difficult job well. For Your mercies' sake, which means the ground of the request is something in God and not something in the person asking.

And that is precisely the thing that separates being loved from being tolerated. Toleration is always about the effort of the one doing it. Love is about what the lover is like.

You are loved for reasons that live in Him and not in your performance this month. The word puts the ground in His mercies, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a rest rather than a fact, because a woman can know she is loved for years before she is able to sit down in it.

And I will not oversell it, because you have heard enough encouragement to last a lifetime and can spot the hollow kind instantly. Nothing here changes the register in that building. People will still be careful with you next Sunday. What is settled is that God is doing something else entirely, and a woman who can tell the two apart hears both of them accurately for the first time in eleven years.