The Wisdom That Is Only Having Been Wrong

Three of them came on Tuesday, and she sat there thinking: none of you should be asking me.

They are in their twenties and thirties. They come for the same reason young women always come: something has happened that has no shape yet, and they want somebody who has been alive longer to look at it and tell them whether it is survivable.

And she does look at it, and she does tell them, and they leave calmer, and one of them wrote to her at Christmas and said she had changed the way she thinks about her mother.

Here is what she has never said. She has no wisdom. What she has is a list.

The eleven years she spent in a church that she now knows was doing damage, and the fact that she defended it. The business decision in the nineties that took eight years to pay off and cost her a friendship. The way she handled her own daughter at nineteen, which she would give a great deal to be able to go back and redo.

And she looks at a woman of twenty seven with a hard problem, and something comes out of her that is useful, and every single time she thinks: I only know that because I got it wrong, and getting it wrong is not the same as knowing.

You know that list. People come to you for a quality and you have a ledger of the failures that produced whatever it is.

Say what the list costs

The list is not the problem and the failures are not the cost. Let me be exact.

What costs her is the private conviction that she is passing off scar tissue as insight. That is a specific loneliness and it sits under every one of those conversations.

It costs her the ability to say anything with weight, because as she says it a second voice runs underneath telling her she has no standing to say it.

And it costs her the good of her own repentance. She has genuinely repented of the eleven years and the nineties and the way she was with her daughter, and been forgiven, and she knows that, and none of it has ever been allowed to become anything other than evidence against her.

You have been treating a forgiven record as a disqualification, and God has never once filed it that way. Psalm 103:12 says as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes as far off a page and puts it on a woman making tea for three visitors on a Tuesday. There is no ledger on His side of this.

God has chosen the foolish things, and the choosing is deliberate

There is one line built for a woman who thinks her only credential is having been wrong.

But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.1 Corinthians 1:27

Read the verb twice, because it is used twice. Has chosen. That is deliberate selection, not salvage. The passage is not saying God makes do with what He is given; it is saying He picks the unimpressive on purpose, as a method, so that the result is unmistakably not the material.

Which means the list is not something He is working around. It is closer to being the reason those three young women get anything useful at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes chosen a live word about a porch on a Tuesday rather than a paradox about the early church.

You were chosen with the record rather than in spite of it, and the choosing was His method rather than His compromise. That is not a way of making somebody feel better about failures. The written word puts the choosing twice in one sentence, and the Spirit is the one who has been putting something useful into a room full of young women for years.

And I want to say the plain thing, because the wrong comfort would ruin it. The relief here is not that you were secretly wise all along and the failures were formative. Some of them were just failures. The relief is that the usefulness was never coming from your record either way.

Scar tissue and insight are not the same thing, and that is fine

There is a fear here worth naming precisely.

The fear is that she is trading on damage. That what she hands those women is not wisdom but the residue of harm, and that a woman who has been badly wrong eleven years running has no business shaping how a twenty seven year old thinks about her mother.

You are not trading on damage, and what arrives in those conversations does not come out of your history. 2 Corinthians 1:4 says He comforts us so that we may comfort others with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a description of a channel rather than a use of somebody's wounds as raw material.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the ledger has gone somewhere heavier, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you speak to any of those young women. That is not a failure of wisdom. That is God sending help with a face on it, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.