You Were Never The Subject

There is a new woman on your floor, and somebody has told her a little of your story before you got the chance to.

So at eleven in the morning she finds you in the small kitchen where the good mugs live, and she leans on the counter while the kettle works, and she asks you straight out how you got from there to here.

You have a version for this. Everybody who has come a long way keeps one.

It runs about three minutes. It is clean. It is not even dishonest. And every single verb in it has your name standing in front of it. I realized. I got sick of living that way. I made the call. I walked into that building on a Monday. I did the work. I did not look back.

She says wow. She says you must be so strong.

You rinse the mug. You put it upside down on the rack. And you stay at the sink a second longer than the mug requires, because the version she has just heard has a hole in the middle of it the exact size of a morning you did not choose.

There was a phone that rang at an hour you had not asked anybody to ring at.

There was a woman from two streets over standing at your door with no earthly reason to be there, who has never fully explained herself and probably could not.

There was one sentence you had heard four hundred times before, and on that particular morning it went in.

And your own contribution, counted honestly, was that you were in the room while it happened.

You cannot say that at work. It sounds like a woman being modest, or worse, like a woman who does not know how she got well. So you go back to your desk and you keep the version.

And the version keeps quietly taking credit for something it did not do. And every time you tell it, something in you gets a little thinner, and you have never once been able to say why.

Find the subject of the sentence

I am a teacher, so let me do grammar with you for a moment.

Not because grammar is tidy. Because in this one case the grammar is the doctrine, and when the sentence is built wrong the whole thing sits wrong, in a way that no amount of gratitude at the end can straighten out.

Here is the first correction, and it arrives as a gift rather than a scolding. You were the object of that sentence and never the subject, and that is not a demotion. Colossians 1:13 carries exactly two verbs and both of them belong to God, and the Holy Spirit did not put you in the object position to make you small. He put you there because that is where the rescued go.

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.Colossians 1:13

Read it as a sentence and nothing else for a second. Subject: He. Verb one: delivered. Verb two: transferred. Object: us. That is the whole architecture of it, and there is no slot anywhere in the line for what we managed, noticed, decided or deserved. Paul is not being modest on our behalf. He is being accurate.

Two verbs, and notice that they are two different jobs. Delivered is the getting out. Transferred is the being set down somewhere else, which is the half everybody forgets, because a rescue that lifts a woman out of the water and leaves her treading in open sea has not finished its work. He did both. Neither one has a place in it for your name.

So the version you tell at work is not a fraud and it is not a lie you cooked up to impress a stranger by the kettle. It is a habit, and a habit can be corrected without anybody being ashamed. You have been carrying a sentence that puts the whole weight of that morning on the one person in the story who could not lift it, and Scripture takes that weight off in a single line, and the Spirit of God is not asking you for a better performance of the account. He is asking for the true one.

Let me close two doors while we are standing here, because both of them are open in most rooms. It was not luck. Help that arrives at a door at an hour nobody could have arranged is not a coincidence with good timing, and a coincidence has no intentions and cannot be thanked. And it was not strength either. Strength is the other explanation, and it is the more flattering of the two, which is exactly why it survives longer in the retelling. What happened in that kitchen and on that street had a Person behind it, and He is the only one in the account with a will.

Which also means the thing you keep quietly bracing for has no meter running on it. You are not living off a private supply of resolve that gets used up, because the word says the kingdom is somewhere you were transferred into rather than somewhere you are holding down by force, and the Holy Spirit is the deposit on that ground, not your grip on it.

Let me say one thing plainly here, in the middle of the page rather than in a footnote, because it belongs in the middle. If the water is over your head right now, and there are thoughts of ending your life or of simply not being here any more, then say it out loud tonight to one living person. Your doctor. A friend who will not flinch. In the United States, 988 answers by call and by text. Anywhere else, emergency services or your nearest crisis line. Picking up that phone is not a failure of faith, and the weight of you is not a burden to whoever answers it. God has always put real rescue into human hands, and taking hold of one of them is obedience, not defeat.