She Said I Made a Difference

They had been waiting in the same line, and got talking, and there was a fifteen minute conversation about nothing in particular, and at the end of it the other woman said, this is going to sound strange, but you made a difference to my life.

And then she explained. Nine years ago. A very short conversation, in a completely different context, which our woman remembers only in outline and probably only because it is now being described to her. She said something. The other woman remembers exactly what she said, and repeated it, and said it changed the direction of a decision she was in the middle of making, and that the decision had gone the other way, and that everything since has come out of that.

Fifteen minutes in a checkout line, nine years later.

She said thank you. She said it warmly and she meant to mean it. And then she went home, and put the groceries away, and started making a case against it.

Not deliberately. The case assembled itself. It went: the woman is being generous. It went: she would have made that decision anyway, people credit the last person who spoke to them. It went: I do not even remember saying it, so how much could it have been.

By the evening she had it entirely dismantled, and she noticed she had done that, and did not know what to do about the noticing.

She is forty seven. She would not say she has low self esteem and would find the phrase irritating. It is more specific and more stubborn than that: she cannot hold a piece of evidence about herself. Facts about her work she can hold. Facts about what she is like, or what she has done to people, slide off, and they slide off within hours, reliably, every time.

She has known this about herself for about a decade and has never found the handle.

You will have your own fifteen minutes. The true sentence about you that took four hours to dismantle and that you cannot argue back into place.

The image Paul uses for exactly this

There is a line in Corinthians where Paul gives a reason for something that most people would have treated as a problem to be explained away.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.2 Corinthians 4:7

The jar is cheap. That is the whole point of choosing that image. Common pottery, breakable, of no value, the sort of thing that is used and discarded. And the treasure is real, and is genuinely inside it.

Now look at the purpose clause, because it is the useful part. To show that the surpassing power belongs to God. The arrangement is deliberate. The mismatch between the container and the contents is not an accident to be apologized for; it is the design, and it exists in order to make something visible.

So take it plainly: you are a container carrying something that is not yours, and that is what 2 Corinthians 4 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a picture of cheap pottery and lays it down in a kitchen where somebody is putting shopping away.

Which reaches the dismantling directly, and from an angle she has not tried.

Her case against the woman in that line was, underneath, a case about the container. She was arguing that a jar like her could not plausibly have produced a nine year consequence. And Paul agrees with her about the jar, entirely, without hesitation, and then says that is exactly why you can believe the account of the treasure.

She has been trying to make the evidence fit her sense of herself. Paul's arrangement never required them to fit. The mismatch is the mechanism.

You have been asked to hold something without having to be its explanation, because the written word puts the treasure inside the clay on purpose and names the reason, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a woman who has been looking for a handle for ten years.

And notice that Paul does not tell the jar to feel better about itself. There is nothing in the verse about the pottery improving its self assessment. It stays cheap and it stays breakable and the treasure stays real. You have nothing to upgrade in order for the account to stand, and Scripture is what removes that requirement, and His Spirit is the one who makes a released requirement feel like room.

What she does not have to do

Now the guardrail, because there is a very common piece of advice here that would not help her.

Nobody is telling her to believe good things about herself. She has tried that. It does not stick, and being told to try harder at something that has never once worked is not ministry, it is a reprimand in a nicer voice.

The verse does not ask for that. It asks for nothing about her assessment of herself at all. It says the treasure is real and the jar is cheap and both are the case, and a woman can carry that arrangement without having resolved anything about her own opinion.

And the fifteen minutes in that line was not an entry anywhere, and nine years of consequence is not a credit. There is no account. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, always, and the receiving comes before the casting down.

You are held by a regard that does not depend on your agreeing with it, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record or our self assessment, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You have nothing to verify and nothing to deserve, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit is what keeps a true sentence from having to survive an evening of cross examination.