If It Asks Me To Sign In I Walk Away

You have a sentence you use, and it is a good one.

Somebody mentions a thing and you say, oh, that is not for me. Or, I never got on with that. Or, I have never been interested in that sort of thing.

And it is said lightly, and the conversation moves on, and nobody has ever once questioned it.

Here is what is actually true, and you know it, which is why this piece may be uncomfortable for about a minute.

You went to look at that thing. You wanted it. And the way in asked you for something you could not produce, and you stood there for a moment, and then you left.

And on the way home you turned it into a preference, because a preference is a thing a person chooses and a wall is a thing that stops them, and it is much easier to carry the first one.

That has happened, by my guess, four or five times. And every one of those four or five things is now filed in your life as something you do not care for.

I want to open that file, gently, because I think there are things in it you actually wanted.

Open to me the gates of righteousness

There is a line about somebody standing outside a gate, and the striking thing is that they ask for it to be opened.

Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and I will praise the LORD. (Psalm 118:19, King James Version)

Open to me. That is a person outside, saying so, out loud, and asking.

They do not pretend they were never interested in going in. They do not say the gate is not for them. They stand there and say what they want.

You are permitted to say out loud that a door is shut and that you wanted to be through it, and no honest request at a gate has ever once been treated as a complaint. Psalm 118:19 says open to me the gates of righteousness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that plain speech possible for somebody who has been calling it a preference.

Notice the second half. I will go into them. The person asking has every intention of going in.

There is no false modesty in the sentence. No pretending it does not matter. They say what they want, and they say what they will do when they get it.

You have permission to say plainly that you wanted something, and no person at a gate has ever once been asked to pretend indifference before they were let in. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes the false lightness out of a person's voice, and it is written that the asking and the intention were said in the same breath.

And the psalm goes on, two verses later, to the stone the builders refused becoming the head of the corner. The whole passage is about somebody left out being brought in.

Being on the outside of something is the subject of that psalm rather than an embarrassment inside it.

You were never in a category Scripture is embarrassed by, and being outside a gate has never once been the thing the psalm treated as shameful. The Spirit of God is the one who makes the excluded one the subject rather than the footnote, and Scripture puts the refused stone at the head of the corner a few lines later.

What a preference is and is not

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not open a file.

A preference is what a person has when they could go either way and choose one. It requires the door to have been open.

That is not what happened here. The door was shut, there was no way through it available in that moment, and a thing that cannot be done is not a thing anybody decided against.

Calling it a preference was a kindness done in a parking lot on the way home, and it worked, and the cost of it is that four or five real wants got permanently mislabeled.

You are carrying four or five mislabeled things, and no wall has ever once become a choice because somebody was gracious about it afterward. The Spirit of God is the one who restores the accurate name to a thing, and Psalm 118:19 has a person standing outside saying so plainly.

And here is the part nobody ever told you. Those ways in are difficult for everybody. They are widely disliked. There are people whose whole job is trying to make them less awful, and they have been at it for years and it is still awful.

You did not fail an easy test. You bounced off a hard one, along with a very large number of other people, and nobody ever told you that because nobody ever says it out loud.

That is a gap in the teaching, and it is not a gap in you.

You have bounced off something difficult that a great many people bounce off, and a hard door has never once been evidence about the person standing at it. The written word puts a person outside a gate asking honestly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells somebody what everybody else has been finding.

Name one of them

Now the small thing, and it does not involve going back anywhere.

I am not going to suggest you try again today. That may be the right thing next month and it is not the thing for this afternoon, and going back before the label is changed would only add another entry to the file.

Say out loud the name of one thing you gave up, and say out loud why you really gave it up.

You are able to name one thing accurately out loud, and calling a thing by its right name has never once made anybody smaller. Psalm 118:19 has somebody saying plainly what they want and where they are standing, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when a woman says it for the first time.

Two sentences. The first is the name of the thing. The second is the true reason.

Something like this. I gave up on that. I gave it up because the way in asked for something I could not produce and I did not know what to do.

Say them both out loud, on your own, at a normal volume.

Because the label has been the whole problem. As long as it is filed under preference, there is nothing to be done about it, because nobody helps a person with a preference. Once it is filed accurately, it becomes a practical problem with a practical answer, and practical problems are things other people can be asked about.

You are turning a closed subject into an ordinary practical question, and one accurate sentence has never once obliged anybody to act on it that same day. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a thing back its real name, and it is written that the one outside said open to me and named where they were.