I Take Their No Home With Me

It is a small thing. That is what makes it so difficult to talk about.

Somebody says no thanks, not really, in an entirely ordinary voice, about a walk. Ten seconds of conversation. Nothing anybody in that room would remember by the weekend.

And you carry it for four hours.

It goes with you into the kitchen. It changes how you answer the next question anybody asks you. There is a quietness that settles on the house that nobody can trace, and one of them eventually says are you alright, and you say yes, and you mean it, because you cannot possibly say the true thing, which is that a fourteen year old declining a walk has flattened you.

I am not going to tell you that is an overreaction. I want to tell you what it actually is, because it is not fragility and it is not vanity.

It is that the no did not stop at the walk. It went further in than the walk, and it landed on the question underneath, which is whether you are somebody your children want.

They have not rejected thee

There is a moment in Samuel where God says something to a man that almost nobody notices.

And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. (1 Samuel 8:7, King James Version)

They have not rejected thee.

Look at what is happening. Samuel is old, he has given his life to these people, and they have just asked for a king instead. That is about as personal as a refusal gets, and he is taking it exactly the way you take a no about a walk.

And the first thing God does is separate the two things. He does not tell Samuel it is fine. He does not tell him to toughen up. He tells him where the no actually landed, which is not on him.

You are not the place where that refusal landed, and it was never a verdict on whether you are wanted here. 1 Samuel 8:7 pulls a man's own person out of a refusal before anything else is said, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as being defended rather than as being corrected.

And notice God does it first. Before the instruction, before the warning about kings, before anything practical. The first move is to get the man out from underneath it.

You have somebody who takes a refusal off you before He says anything else, and it was never a thing you had to sort out on your own upstairs. The written word puts the separating sentence before every other sentence, and the Spirit of God is what makes a hallway on a Tuesday the same kind of ground.

What the four hours are made of

Now let me name what happens in those four hours, because I think it will loosen it.

The no arrives, and in about a second and a half your mind runs a much larger question through it. Not: does he want to walk today. But: does he like being with me, and have I lost him, and was this always going to happen.

None of those were asked. None of them were answered. But the answer to the small question gets applied to all of them, because they are stacked underneath it, and a fourteen year old saying not really has now apparently settled the whole lot.

That is not weakness. That is what happens when a question matters enormously and gets no other opportunity to be asked. A refusal can be put down in the hallway, and carrying it upstairs was never part of what was asked of you.

You are not carrying a small thing badly, and it was never an ordinary no that had four hours in it. 1 Samuel 8 separates the person from the refusal before it does anything else, which is exactly why the Spirit of God does that same separating in a kitchen.

And here is the part that matters practically. The four hours do not stay with you. The house catches them. Nobody knows what happened, and everybody adjusts, and the child who said no learns that saying no makes the evening go strange, which makes the next no more expensive for everybody.

Say it out loud and go out

Here is the practical part, and it is deliberately physical, because this is not a thing you can think your way out of in a hallway.

When the no comes, say alright out loud. Not in your head. Out loud, in a normal voice, so your own ears hear it. Then put your shoes on and go out for twenty minutes, by yourself.

You are able to move your body before that question gets a chance to run, and it has never once been avoidance to walk out of a room. The passage answers a refusal by first getting a man out from under it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody putting shoes on in a hall at five o'clock.

The twenty minutes are not a sulk and they are not a lesson. Nobody is being taught anything and nobody should be told they made you go. They are simply the four hours, spent outdoors and finished, instead of indoors and spread over everybody.

Come back in and be ordinary. Do not refer to it. That is the whole method.

You are able to end it in twenty minutes instead of four hours, and it has never once needed anybody in this house to apologize for it to be over. 1 Samuel 8:7 takes the personal weight off first and lets the rest be handled after, and the Spirit of God is the one who walks a street with a woman getting out from underneath a small sentence.