Waiting For The But

She realized what she was doing in a corridor in April and it took about a second and a half.

Somebody had stopped her, a woman she works with, and said something genuinely good about a thing she had done. It was three sentences long. It was specific, which is what made it good.

And she was not listening to any of it.

She was waiting for the turn. There is always a turn. Somewhere in the third sentence or just after it there is going to be a however, or a the only thing is, or the worst one, which is a small pause and then her name.

It did not come. The woman finished, and smiled, and went off toward the lifts, and she stood there in the corridor and breathed out and understood, all at once, that she had been holding her breath through a compliment.

She is thirty nine.

She has done that her whole working life and most of her private one. Kind sentence, brace, wait, and if the turn does not come, relief, and if it does come, at least she was ready.

It is not paranoia. That is what she would want said. It is a completely reasonable adaptation to a specific history, which is that in the place she trained, and then in the two jobs after it, comfort was how a correction was introduced. Every time. It was the professional style: something warm, then the actual point. Everybody knew.

Eleven years of that and it goes in. You stop hearing the warm part as a thing in itself; it becomes a signal that something is coming, in the way a particular ringtone becomes a signal.

And the trouble is that it does not stay at work.

She has been doing it in prayer. That is the part that got her to this article. When something kind arrives from God in a verse or in a moment, she braces, and reads on, and waits for the correction, and there is a whole shelf of Scripture she has never received one word of because she has been reading it as the setup.

You know the brace. Yours may have come from somewhere else entirely. But you know what it is to hear a warm sentence as a preface, and to have got so used to bracing that you cannot remember what a kind thing feels like on its own.

The sentence ends where it ends

Let me name the pit before we go to the text, because if this becomes an instruction to stop bracing it will fail, and you will add it to the list of things you are not doing well enough.

The pit is not suspicion. You are not a suspicious woman; you are a woman who learned a pattern in a place where the pattern was real, and learned it accurately, and is now applying it in a room where it does not hold. And you cannot un-learn a pattern by disapproving of it. What you can do is meet a sentence that does not have the pattern in it, repeatedly, until your body finds out.

So here is a sentence that does not turn.

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13

Read to the end of it and then stop, because it stops.

There is no however. There is no the only thing is. There is no pause and then a name. It says one thing about what God does and it finishes, and nothing is introduced by it and nothing is being set up.

And notice who chose the picture, because that matters here more than anywhere. God did. About Himself. In the first person, in His own words, and He was not building toward a point.

Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground 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 God chose to say what His comfort is like. It does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by a title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays exactly the shape He gave it. Scripture uses a father's language for Him constantly and a mother's deliberately, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it is His own.

You are not waiting on a second clause, and you were never handed comfort as a way into a correction. Isaiah 66:13 stops at the full stop and nothing follows that undoes it, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a woman hear a kind sentence all the way through.

Take that in the corridor, and know it is not my reassurance, it is His own sentence. You are being comforted, and there is nothing coming after it. Isaiah 66:13 ends where it ends, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, and He is not using it to introduce anything.