The Compliment I Fumbled

It took about nine seconds and it happened in April and she has thought about it most days since.

A woman she does not know stopped her in a doorway and said something specific. Not a general nice thing. She named a thing that had happened eighteen months earlier and said, that made a real difference to us, and I have wanted to say so for a long time.

And she said, oh, that was nothing.

Then the woman said something else warm, and she said, honestly, anyone would have, and the woman smiled and moved on, and that was the end of it.

Here is what has bothered her since, and it is not embarrassment about being awkward, although there is some of that. It is that the sentence that was nothing was a lie, and she knew it was a lie while it was leaving her mouth. It was not nothing. It cost her a significant amount at a time when she did not have it, and she remembers exactly what she gave up in order to do it, and eighteen months later a stranger stood in a doorway and told her it had mattered, and she looked directly at that and said it was nothing.

She has run the exchange back a lot. And what she has arrived at is that she was not being modest. She was doing something more like getting rid of it. The thank you arrived and she needed it out of her hands within about two seconds and the fastest available route was denial.

And she cannot work out why. It was a good thing. It was true. Somebody wanted her to have it.

There is a second layer she likes even less. When she plays it back, the version where she says thank you, and the woman says something else, and there is a pause, and the two of them stand there with the thing between them, is unbearable to imagine. Not awkward. Unbearable.

You will have your own doorway. The nine seconds in which somebody handed you something true and you got rid of it as fast as you could.

Where a good thing is from

There is a sentence in James that is usually read as a comfort about God's consistency, and it is that, and it is also a piece of information about traffic direction.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.James 1:17

Coming down. The participle is continuous. It is not a description of a one time delivery; it is a description of a direction that is always running.

Which means the thing that woman handed her in a doorway had already been traveling before it got to the doorway. It did not originate with the woman. It did not originate with her either. It was in transit, and the doorway was a point along a route, and both of them were standing in the middle of something that started somewhere else.

So take it plainly: you are standing in the path of something that was already moving, and that is what James 1 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about lights and lays it down in a doorway in April.

And that changes what the two seconds are for. Her instinct was that the thank you had to be either kept or refused, and keeping felt dangerous, so refusal was the only exit. But if the thing is in transit, there is a third option that is not a compromise between those two. It can be received and passed on, in the direction it was already going, which is upward.

That is what the elders do in Revelation with the only thing anybody in the book is ever seen to be given. They do not refuse the crowns. Refusing is not in the scene. They take them and they put them down in front of the throne, which is a movement, and it is the same movement James is describing, run in reverse.

You have somewhere to put a kind word rather than nowhere, because the written word gives the good thing an origin above and a direction through, and His Spirit is what makes that reach the part of a woman that has been treating a compliment like something hot.

And it is worth noticing what the rest of that verse is doing, because James does not stop at the direction. He describes the sender as somebody with no variation and no shadow due to change, which is astronomy language about a light that does not flicker. The point is that the supply is not intermittent. She has been handling that thank you as though it were the last one and therefore too significant to touch. You are standing under something that does not flicker, and Scripture is what establishes the steadiness rather than my encouragement, and His Spirit is the one who makes a steady thing feel safe to take hold of.

The thing this site will not tell you to do

Now the guardrail, and it is the most important paragraph here, because a lot of Christian advice on this subject is quietly poisonous.

Nobody is telling her to deflect. Deflecting is what she did in the doorway and it is what has bothered her for a year. The elders do not wave the crowns away and they do not tell whoever gave them that it was nothing. They receive, and then they lay down, and those are two separate motions and the first one is not optional.

And being appreciated is not pride. A woman standing in a doorway with somebody's gratitude in her hands has not done anything wrong and does not need to be careful. If this site ever teaches somebody to refuse thanks in order to be safe, it has taught the opposite of what Revelation 4 shows.

Nor is the good thing she did a payment or an entry. There is no account. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, every single time, and the throwing down comes after the receiving and not instead of it.

You are held by a regard that did not go up when she thanked you, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You have nothing to earn from a kind word and nothing to fear from one, and Scripture is what settles both, and His Spirit is what keeps the settling from wearing off the next time somebody stops you in a doorway.