The Answer I Performed At The Breakfast

Two chairs on a low stage, ninety women, and a microphone that made her voice sound like somebody else.

The woman interviewing her was lovely. Genuinely, warmly lovely, and she had one of those voices that makes a room lean in. And about eleven minutes in she asked the question, the one that had been sitting on the running order all morning like a stone in a shoe.

So tell us. How did you keep your faith through all of that?

And here is what happened, in about a second and a half, in front of ninety people with their forks down.

She saw the answer she was supposed to give. It arrived fully formed, with a small pause in the right place and a gentle landing at the end, and it was made of things she genuinely believes and it was, as a description of the last two years, not true. And she gave it. And the room made that sound a room makes. And somebody at table four cried.

She sat in her car in the hotel lot afterward for eleven minutes.

Because the awful thing is not that she lied. She did not lie. The awful thing is how good it was, and how quickly it came, and what that says about how long she has been assembling it.

You know this. Maybe not a stage. But you have given the version that works, and you were fluent, and the fluency is what has been bothering you since.

Count what the performance cost

Nobody in that room could have counted it, so let us.

It cost her the actual answer, which she has still not said out loud to anybody, and which gets a little harder to say every month it stays in. It cost her table four, in a way, because a woman cried at something that was not quite real. It cost her the two friends in that room who know how the last two years actually went and who have not mentioned the breakfast since, which is its own kind of loud.

And it cost her the confidence that she knows where the assembled version ends and she begins.

You have been carrying a rehearsed answer that has started to stand in for the real one, and God has never once been given the rehearsed one and taken it. Psalm 51:6 says He desires truth in the inward parts, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it in a hotel parking lot at half past eleven. The fluent version has never worked on Him and He has never once required the fluent version.

The answer she actually had was in the other verse

There is one line built for a woman who was asked how she kept her faith.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for you: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:9

Look at the shape of that. Somebody asks God to take something away, three times, and gets a no. And what he is given instead of the removal is a sentence, and the sentence does not say you were strong. It says the strength was made perfect in the place where he had none.

Which means the honest answer to how did you keep your faith through all of that is, quite often, I did not keep anything, He kept me, and that answer is available on a stage and it fits in five seconds, and it is His Spirit who makes that a live option rather than a self deprecating remark.

You have a true answer that is shorter than the assembled one, and it was given to you rather than composed by you. That is not a clever way out of a hard question. The written word puts the perfecting in the weakness and never once compliments the man, and the Spirit is the one who makes saying so feel like relief rather than exposure.

And I want to be plain, because this site would be a cruelty otherwise. Your honest answer is not a technique for better ministry. It is not a more effective way to move a room. Nothing here asks you to perform vulnerability, which is only the same stage with a different script, and what ninety women do with anything you say is not your responsibility.

What a true sentence sounds like with a microphone in front of it

The constraint is exactly the same on a stage as it is at a school gate, and the stage does not get an exemption.

It has to be true. It has to be sayable. And it must not put her on display, which rules out the assembled version and also rules out the confessional version, because a woman telling ninety people how bad February was is still the subject of the room.

What is left is something like: honestly, I did not keep it, it kept me, and I could not tell you how. Or: I am not sure I did keep it, and He did not let go.

You are allowed to give a room a true short thing rather than a good long thing, and the short one is not a failure of the platform. 2 Corinthians 12:9 is the ground under that, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes sufficient into a word a woman can actually stand on with a microphone in her hand.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the two years have somewhere in them that you have never said out loud to anybody, and if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, not from a stage, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line first. That is not a failure of faith. That is what a true sentence is actually for.