Tested by Being Praised

She would tell you, and has told two people, that she prefers being overlooked. And she is not performing when she says it, and it is also not quite true, and she knows both of those things.

What happened was that somebody named her from the front of a room, warmly and at some length, and the room responded, and she went home afterwards and could not settle, and the not settling lasted about nine days.

Here is what makes this article different from the obvious version of it. She has been overlooked before. Extensively. Twenty years of doing things that produced no recognition, some of it hard, none of it noticed. And overlooked was uncomfortable and it was survivable and she has a practiced set of things she does with it.

Being named was not survivable in the same way. It got into her. It kept coming back. On day four she woke up at about five and lay there running the sentences again, and what she noticed with real alarm was that she had started to like it.

That is the thing. Not that the praise hurt. That it did not.

And that frightened her more than twenty years of nothing ever had, because she had built a whole self on being the kind of person who does not need this, and here was direct evidence, from her own bed at five in the morning, that she does.

She is forty two. She has not said this to anybody, including the two people she told the first part to.

You will have your own day four. The moment you discovered you liked something you had spent years being the sort of person who does not need.

The proverb about the crucible

There is a proverb that is usually read as a warning and is more interesting than that.

The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and a man is tested by his praise.Proverbs 27:21

The image is a refiner's fire, which is where metal goes to have what is not metal driven out of it. And the proverb says praise does that to a person.

Now, most people read that as: be careful, praise is dangerous, it will expose your vanity. And there is something in that. But look at what a crucible actually is for. It is not a trap and it is not a punishment. It is a piece of equipment for finding out what is really there, and the silver goes into it in order to come out as silver.

So take it plainly: you are in a piece of equipment rather than in a trap, and that is what Proverbs 27 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about metallurgy and lays it down in a bed at five in the morning on day four.

Which is exactly what she needs, because the frightening discovery was not a failure of the process. It was the process working. She found out, at five in the morning, that she likes being seen. That is not a vanity that has been exposed and must now be dealt with. That is a true fact about a human being, which twenty years of being overlooked had allowed her to avoid knowing.

And notice what the proverb does not say. It does not say a man is ruined by his praise. It does not warn him to avoid it. Testing is not the same as endangering, and the verse is descriptive rather than a prohibition.

You have been shown something true rather than caught out, because the written word calls praise a test rather than a snare, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a woman lying awake being frightened of herself.

And here is the part that matters most. The thing that came out of the crucible at five in the morning is not shameful. Liking to be seen is not a sin; it is the ordinary condition of a creature made to be known. The whole of Scripture assumes people want to be seen, which is why being seen by God is offered as a comfort rather than as a consolation prize. You have wanted something you were made to want, and Scripture is what establishes that rather than my going easy, and His Spirit is the one who lets a person hold an appetite without having to be ashamed of it.

What she does not have to do about it

Now the guardrail, and it needs to be firm.

Nobody is telling her to work on this. There is no program here for becoming a person who is indifferent to praise, and if there were, it would produce exactly the self she has just discovered was constructed.

And being honored is not dangerous. If this site ever teaches a woman that the safe place is to be overlooked, it has taught her to hide from the thing Revelation shows the elders doing: receiving, and then casting down, both motions, unembarrassed.

Nor is the twenty years an entry, and nor is the nine days a failure. There is no account. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, always.

You are held by a regard that did not change on day four, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record or our motives, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You have nothing to purify and nothing to be ashamed of having liked, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit is what stops a true discovery from turning into a project.