It Would Not Let Me In And I Cried

You needed to get in and it would not let you.

That is the whole of what happened, factually. You put in what you thought was right. It said no. You put it in again more carefully. It said no again. And then it stopped letting you try.

And you were somewhere. That is the part that matters. There was somebody waiting, or a counter, or a person being patient at you in a way that was worse than impatience.

And then you cried, either there or in the car.

It is months later now and the thing itself got sorted out. Somebody helped, or it came back, or you went a different way round. Nobody would say it was a problem anymore.

But you are still carrying that afternoon, and you have never told anybody about it, and that is what I want to talk about.

Because the thing that hurt was never the being locked out. It was being seen. It was standing in a public place, unable to do a thing that everybody around you appeared to be doing without thinking, with your face going hot.

That is a different injury altogether, and nobody has ever treated it as one.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle

There is a line where somebody asks God to keep their crying, and the image is very physical.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Into thy bottle. Collected. Kept. Not wiped away and not hurried past.

The picture is of somebody gathering something up carefully because it is worth keeping, and the thing being gathered is a person's crying.

You are somebody whose tears were collected rather than dismissed, and no crying in a car has ever once been beneath the notice of heaven. Psalm 56:8 says put thou my tears into thy bottle, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that solid for a woman who has told nobody about that afternoon.

Notice the first phrase too, which usually gets skipped. Thou tellest my wanderings. Tellest means counts. God is described as counting the times a person went back and forth, up and down, getting nowhere.

The going round in circles is counted. Not judged. Counted, the way you count something valuable.

You have had every circle counted by somebody who was watching without judging, and no wandering has ever once been recorded as a failure anywhere. The Holy Spirit is the one who counts what a person did rather than grading it, and it is written that the wanderings and the tears are both kept.

And the last part is a question rather than a statement, which is worth noticing. Are they not in thy book. The person praying is asking, half certain, half hoping.

Scripture keeps the question in. It does not tidy the uncertainty out of a person who is upset.

You were never required to be certain in order to be heard, and no half sure prayer has ever once been turned back at the door. The Spirit of God is the one who receives an uncertain sentence as a whole prayer, and Scripture leaves the question mark in the verse exactly where the man put it.

What actually happened that afternoon

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not lift a humiliation.

Separate the two things, because they have been welded together in your memory and they are not the same event.

The first thing is a system that did not recognize you. That happens to everybody, constantly, every day, in every building in the country. It is one of the most common events there is.

The second thing is that it happened where people could see, and you had no way to explain yourself, and there was no one to say to the room, this is not her fault.

You are carrying two separate events as though they were one, and being locked out has never once been the same event as being seen while it happened. The Spirit of God is the one who separates two things that have been welded together, and Psalm 56:8 keeps the tears and the wanderings as distinct items in the same book.

And here is the fact nobody has ever told you, because the people who know it learned it so young they do not know it is a fact. Those things lock people out constantly, on purpose, and it is a feature rather than a fault.

A thing that let a person in after two wrong tries would be no use at all. The locking is the whole point of it, and it locked you out for exactly the same reason it would lock out anybody.

You were shut out by something doing precisely what it was built to do, and a lock working correctly has never once been a comment on the person standing in front of it. The written word puts the tears into a bottle rather than into a ledger of failures, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a verdict out of an ordinary event.

Say what happened

Now the small thing, and it does not involve any screen at all.

I am not going to suggest you go back and try again. That may need doing and it is not what today is for, and the afternoon is the thing that is still costing you.

Say out loud to one person what happened that afternoon.

You are able to say a plain account of one bad afternoon out loud, and telling somebody a true thing has never once made a woman smaller. Psalm 56:8 has a man asking for his crying to be kept, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman says it for the first time.

And stop at the facts. That is the important half. What happened, where, and that you cried afterward. That is all of it.

No explaining why you could not remember. No account of how these things are always difficult for you. No apology for having been upset about something small.

Because the additions are where the humiliation lives. The facts on their own are just facts, and facts are survivable. It is the commentary that has been doing the damage, and the commentary is all yours.

You are handing somebody the facts and keeping the commentary out of it, and a plain account has never once required anybody to grade themselves while giving it. The Spirit of God is the one who takes the explaining out of a woman's mouth, and it is written that the wanderings are counted rather than assessed.