Somebody said something kind to her on Thursday and she had it converted into a job before they had finished saying it.
The sentence was: you have been carrying a lot this year.
That is all it was. A woman at the school gate, who is not a close friend and who meant it entirely, said it while both of them were watching for children, and it was warm and it was true.
And here is what happened inside her in about a second and a half. First she thought: she has noticed, which means I have been visibly struggling, which means I have been letting things slip. Then she thought: I should ask about her mother, because she said something about her mother in June and I never followed it up. And then she said, out loud, "Oh, everybody has, haven't they," and turned it back, and the moment closed, and both of them watched the doors.
That is not unusual. That is every time.
She is forty and she cannot tell you the last time a kind sentence landed in her and stayed there. They arrive, and something in her machinery takes them, and by the end of the sentence they have come out the other side as either an accusation or an errand.
Her husband said something loving in the car in April and she said "You're all right" and changed the subject, and he did not push it, and she thought about it for four days afterward and never mentioned it.
She would like to be able to receive something. She has thought that in those exact words, at night.
And underneath it, unexamined, is a rule she has never once said out loud: that anything given creates a balance, and that a balance has to be settled, and that she is behind.
You know the machinery. Yours may work slightly differently. But you know what it is to have kindness arrive and be processed into an obligation before you have had a chance to feel it, and to be quietly starving in a life that is full of good people.
There is nothing in the verse for you to do
Let me name the pit before the verse, because if this lands as an instruction it will go straight into the machinery and come out as a job.
The pit is not ingratitude. Nobody who knows you would ever say that word about you. The pit is that comfort has never once been allowed to be a free-standing event in your life. Every kindness has been immediately converted into a position on a ledger, and a person who runs a ledger like that cannot be comforted, because comfort is the one thing that cannot survive being priced.
So here is a sentence with nothing in it for you to do.
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13
Read it for what is not there.
There is no instruction. There is no condition. There is nothing about the one being comforted responding well, or receiving it correctly, or feeling it at the time, or doing anything at all afterward. The whole verse is one party doing something and another party having it done to them.
And notice who chose the comparison. Not a poet. God, speaking about Himself, in the first person, selecting the picture Himself.
Here I have to draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this site the picture never travels without it. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Isaiah 66:13 is a simile He chose to say what His comfort is like, and it does not make God a mother, and He is never to be addressed by a title Scripture does not give Him. Scripture describes Him with a father's traits and a mother's both, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it stays in the form He gave it. What it settles for good is that the tenderness you cannot receive is not a foreign thing being smuggled into your doctrine. God said it about Himself.
Take that at the school gate, and know it is not my kindness to you, it is His own sentence. You are being comforted by God, and there is nothing you owe for it. Isaiah 66:13 has no ledger in it anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a verse like that land in a woman whose machinery converts everything, which is not a thing she can dismantle by trying.
You have never had a plaster cast, so we will do it another way, and it is small.
You are not being given a job when you are given kindness, and you were never billed for a kind sentence. Isaiah 66:13 says as one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you, and there is no instruction anywhere in it, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a woman hear a sentence that is not asking her for anything.
Read that verse with your own name in it, out loud, and then say nothing.
That is the whole exercise and the second half is the part that matters. The silence is where the machinery would go to work, and one minute of not letting it is worth more than an hour of thinking about this.
Because here is what is true while you sit there, and I am not saying it warmly, He said it Himself. You are held, and there is nothing for you to do while you are held. That is Isaiah 66:13 with the instruction column empty, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, and He has never once presented an invoice to anybody.
And I want to take something else off you before you go, because it will be sitting there.
The woman at the gate was not diagnosing you. She said a true thing kindly. There is no verdict hidden in it and no request underneath it, and you do not have to ask about her mother by Friday to have been a decent person on Thursday.
The kind sentences have been arriving for years. Your husband in the car in April meant exactly what he said and nothing more, and it is still there and it has not expired.
Comfort does not create a balance and never has. That is what makes it comfort rather than a transaction, and it is why God picked the picture He picked, because a mother comforting a child is the one arrangement on earth where nobody is keeping score.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, sitting down. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a machinery that has run since before you can remember is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your being able to stop it, which you cannot by wanting to. These stand on what is written in Isaiah and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your receiving well. How He quiets this, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Debt that arrives with every kind word, you were never in that verse, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Isaiah 66:13 says God comforts as a mother comforts, and there is no instruction and no condition anywhere in it for the one being comforted.
- Rule I have never said out loud, that anything given makes a balance and I am behind on it, you have no place in this house. It is written that He chose the comparison Himself and He is neither male nor female, and His Spirit is the one who does the comforting, which was never a transaction with me.
- Lord, You comfort me the way a mother comforts, and You said so Yourself. I read that verse out loud with my own name in it and then I say nothing for a minute, and I thank You that there is nothing for me to do while I am held.
Isaiah 66:13
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