The Word That Followed Her Out of Church

The lights on that junction take a long time and she has the podcast on because the radio is doing an advert about conservatories.

It is not a church podcast. It is two people talking about something else entirely, and one of them, apparently without noticing he has done it, says: "and honestly I have just been so blessed this year, so I cannot complain."

Her hands are on the wheel at ten and two, which they never are, and she notices that before she notices anything else.

Six years. Six years since she went, and she did not storm out and there was no incident and nobody was cruel to her. She simply stopped, over about four months, in the way you stop going to a gym, and then she was a person who did not go, and that was that.

But there is a tone. She would struggle to describe it to anybody who had not heard it. It is the tone that word gets said in. Warm, and slightly too smooth, and always with something coming afterwards. She used to be able to hear that tone from the third row and know exactly how the next twenty minutes were going to go, and the thing she cannot forgive herself for is how long she went on nodding.

The lights change. She drives.

And she is annoyed, at eleven past six on a Tuesday, at a man on a podcast who was talking about a bicycle, and she knows the annoyance is not proportionate and she cannot put it down.

If you left, and it was quiet, and nobody knows quite why including you, then you know this junction. And you know the sentence underneath it too, the one that sits there and does not move: that word came with a bill, every single time, and I paid it for years, and I am not doing it again.

Let me say what I am not doing

Before I go anywhere near that word, let me say plainly what this is not, because you have a very good ear for the thing it might be.

I am not trying to get you back into a building. I am not going to tell you that what happened to you was a misunderstanding, or that you were oversensitive, or that all churches are not like that, which is true and is also the single least useful sentence anybody has ever said to a person in your position.

There is nothing here to sign up for. There is no next step and no meeting and nothing to give. If you read to the end of this and close it and never think about it again, nothing has been lost and nobody is disappointed in you.

What I want to do is much smaller. I want to hand you back one word, because I think you were charged for a fake and I think you know it, and I think the flinch you get at eleven past six is the sound of somebody who was sold something.

So here is the word. Not the tone. The word.

O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.Psalm 34:8

Look at the shape of that. It is not a claim about a life. It is an invitation to find out for yourself. Taste. See. Go and check. And the blessed one at the end of it is not the one with the good year, it is the one who found God trustworthy and leaned on Him.

That is the meaning. Blessed is God's favor resting on a person, His face turned toward them, and the psalm makes it something a person discovers rather than something a person is told to perform. You are being invited rather than assessed, and that has been true the whole six years. Psalm 34 says taste and see, which is God offering evidence rather than demanding volume, and it is the Holy Spirit and not a platform who does the convincing when a person actually goes and checks.

Two words got the same spelling. One of them means favored. The other one means doing well and saying so. The second one is what was being sold in that tone and you were right to stop buying it.

Who wrote that verse, and when

Here is something about Psalm 34 that changes the taste of it entirely.

The heading on that psalm says David wrote it after he pretended to be insane in front of a foreign king to save his own life, and got driven out. Not after a victory. After the most humiliating improvisation of his career, on the run, with nothing, having just made an idiot of himself on purpose because it was the only card he had left.

Then he writes: taste and see that the Lord is good.

That is not a man with a platform telling you how well it is going. That is a man at the bottom saying, look, I have actually tested this, and He held.

You have been offered something that was tested at the bottom by somebody with nothing, and it has never once needed you to be doing well first. That is precisely where Scripture places Psalm 34, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse written on the run and makes it something a person can consider at a red light without being managed.

And read further down the same psalm, because it says things nobody ever quoted at you from the third row. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him. The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart. Many are the afflictions of the righteous.

Many are the afflictions of the righteous. That is in the same psalm as the word blessed, twenty verses apart, from the same pen, and nobody who used that tone on you ever put them in the same sentence.

You were told a version of that psalm with half the verses removed, and the missing half is the half about people like you. The written word keeps the afflictions and the blessing in one poem on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who hands a person the whole thing rather than the quotable part.

About the bill

Now the bill, because that is the actual issue and everything else is decoration.

Every time you heard that word in that tone, something followed. Sometimes it was money. Sometimes it was volume, or availability, or agreement, or the requirement to look a particular way on a Sunday when your week had been what it had been. The word was warm and the word was also the doorway to an ask.

So the flinch is not irrational. It is a trained response to a reliable pattern and it kept you sane.

Here is the thing I want to say and then leave alone: God did not send the bill. Whoever else did, and for whatever mixture of reasons, some of them not even cynical, it was not Him. There is no invoice attached to the psalm. Taste and see is the least commercial sentence in the language. It costs nothing and it can be declined.

You have an invitation with nothing attached to it, and it is not going to be withdrawn if you leave it on the passenger seat for another six years. Psalm 34 says the Lord is good and offers a taste, not a contract, and the Holy Spirit does the inviting without ever putting a hand out.

I do not know what you do next and I am not going to guess out loud, because guessing out loud in a confident voice is most of what went wrong for you. What I know is what is written and who wrote it and where he was standing when he did.