Somebody Laughed At Me When I Was Seventeen

Aoife was seventeen and it was a gas station lot in the winter.

She was with three other people. Somebody had opened the hood of somebody's car and there was a conversation happening, and Aoife asked a question. She does not remember the question. That is the strange part and the part she has thought about most: she has no memory whatsoever of what she asked.

What she remembers is the laugh.

It was one person, and it was one second, and it was almost certainly not unkind. Twenty two years later she could not tell you whether it was mean. She could tell you the exact quality of it, the pitch, the way it stopped, and the small silence that followed while somebody else answered her nicely.

She has not asked a question about a car since.

Now, twenty two years is a long time, and I want to be honest about what that has looked like, because it is not dramatic. Nobody would describe Aoife as damaged. She is thirty nine and she is capable and she has a job where she asks difficult questions of senior people every week and is respected for it.

It is one narrow lane. In that lane, she does not ask.

At a service counter, she says "whatever you think." When something happens to the car, she describes it to her partner and he asks the questions. When somebody explains something to her, she nods with an expression of engaged interest that has been fully operational since about 2005.

And the specific price of it is this: every single time she does not ask, some part of her agrees again with a seventeen year old's conclusion, which is that asking is dangerous in this particular room.

Her partner said in the spring, "Just ask him. He's nice."

And she said, "You do it. You're better at it."

And he did, and he is not better at it, and both of them know exactly what happened there.

One second, still charging interest

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to tell you to get over it, because a person does not get over a thing by being told to, and I have never once seen that work in twenty years of sitting with people. And I am not going to tell you what was wrong with the person who laughed, because I was not there and it does not matter and it may well have been nothing.

What I want to look at is the arithmetic, and then at what God does with it.

The arithmetic first, because it is worth seeing plainly.

One second. In the winter, on a gas station lot, twenty two years ago. Nothing was said. Nobody was cruel. There was no incident and nobody in that group remembers it, and if anybody found them today and asked, they would have no idea what the question meant.

And that one second has set the rules in an entire lane of a person's life ever since. It has been present at every service counter. It has answered for her at least a hundred times. It has produced, cumulatively, thousands of small moments of a competent woman going quiet.

That is what shame does that ordinary embarrassment does not. Embarrassment ends. Shame gets a job and keeps it.

You are not a fragile person, and Scripture never once treats a wound that has kept working as evidence about the one carrying it. It is written that God gives beauty for ashes and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, which is Isaiah 61 describing an exchange rather than an instruction to recover, and His Spirit is the one who makes that exchange available in a narrow lane of a life.

Now here is the verse I want, and it does something people do not expect.

For your shame ye shall have double; and for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion: therefore in their land they shall possess the double.Isaiah 61:7

Read what the shame gets exchanged for.

Not removal. Not repair. Not a return to how it was before. Double.

That is a legal image. Under the old law, when somebody was wronged, restitution was frequently double, and it was not sentiment, it was accounting. What it says is that God does not treat a shamed person as somebody to be patched back to neutral. He treats them as somebody owed.

You have been carrying something God treats as a debt owed to you, and the passage puts double where the shame was rather than merely a repair. Isaiah 61 says for your shame ye shall have double, which is a settlement rather than a consolation, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that arithmetic true about one second on a gas station lot in the winter.

The rule was written by a seventeen year old

Here is the part I want to hand you, and it is not a technique.

The rule that runs that lane of your life was written by a girl of seventeen, standing on cold concrete, with three people watching, using the only information she had, which was one second of a laugh.

She was not wrong to write it. At seventeen, with that data, it was a reasonable rule and it protected her.

But look at who is enforcing it now. A woman of thirty nine, with a job, in rooms full of senior people, who asks hard questions for a living. She has vastly more information than the girl on the gas station lot had. She has twenty two years of evidence that people mostly answer questions, and that being wrong in front of somebody is survivable, and that she personally survives it about four times a week at work.

The rule has never once been reviewed against any of that. It has simply been obeyed.

You have the standing to review a rule you were given at seventeen, and no part of the written word requires anybody to keep a verdict handed down by a frightened girl. Isaiah 61 has God undoing what was done to the ones who were bound rather than asking them to live inside it, and the Spirit of God is what makes a review of an old rule something a person can actually do.

And I want to say the tenderest part, because it is the one that will help most.

You do not have to feel differently in order to ask. That is the trap. Everybody waits to feel ready, and readiness never arrives on its own, because the feeling is downstream of the doing and not upstream of it.

The first question you ask will feel exactly as bad as you expect. That is not a sign that it is going wrong. That is what a twenty two year old rule feels like when it is being disobeyed.

You were never required to be free of the feeling first, and Scripture puts the exchange in God's hands rather than in a person's readiness. Isaiah 61 has Him appointing and giving and putting on rather than asking anybody to arrive already changed, and His Spirit is what makes a question askable while it still feels dangerous.