Where to Put a Kind Word

It happens in the corridor between the day room and the double doors, which is the worst possible place for it, because her hands are full. Her mother's coat is over one arm. A paper bag of laundry is in the other hand, and it has a knot in the handle she will have to pick at in the car.

A nurse coming the other way slows down for about two seconds and says, not making a speech of it, just saying it: I hope somebody tells you what you do for her. Then she is past, and through the doors, and gone.

And the daughter says the thing she always says. Oh, well. You know. Anyone would.

Nobody would. That is the plain fact of it. Six years of nights, a sofa with a permanent dent in it, a phone that goes on the pillow, a job she stepped down from and has never mentioned to anybody. But the sentence is already out of her mouth before her brain caught up, because she has no shelf for a compliment and never has had. So she carries it out to the parking lot instead, and it sits with her at the lights, and three weeks later it is still there, going round, and she has not once been able to say thank you for it. A kind word is the one thing this woman cannot carry, and she can carry anything.

You know how that goes. Somebody said something good about you recently and you got rid of it as fast as you could. Not out of humility. Out of not knowing where it goes.

Why the deflection is so quick

Let me name the low place, because there is one under all this and it is not what people assume. It is not that she thinks poorly of herself. It is that praise feels like a bill. If she takes it, she owes something: she has to keep it up, she has to be the sort of woman who deserves that sentence, and she is far too tired to sign for anything else. So the fastest way out is to refuse delivery. Oh, well. Anyone would.

And there is a second thing underneath, which good church people carry more than most. Somewhere along the way she learned that letting a kind word land is the first step toward getting above yourself. So she has spent years batting them away and calling it modesty, and it is not modesty, it is a woman with nowhere to put a thing that was given to her in good faith.

There is a place. It is in Scripture, in a very old prayer, prayed out loud by a king in front of a whole assembly who had just been extremely generous, and it is the single best sentence in the Bible for a person who cannot take a compliment.

But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you.1 Chronicles 29:14

Of your own have we given you. That is not self-erasure and it is not a man refusing to be thanked. David is standing in front of everybody, holding an enormous act of faithfulness in both hands, and instead of dropping it or clutching it he passes it on up. You have somewhere to put it, and the somewhere is a Person, and this is not a nice idea of mine: it is what is written in 1 Chronicles 29, and it is His Spirit who makes the passing on feel like relief rather than like losing something.

Which is the whole answer to the bill. You have been handed something to carry rather than something to sign for, because the written word gives the honor a direction instead of a debtor, and His Spirit is what turns a direction into somewhere a tired woman can actually stand.

Two hands, and what each one is for

Watch what David actually does, because there are two movements in it and most of us only ever learn one.

The first movement is receiving. He does not deny that anything happened. He does not say the offering was nothing, or that anyone would have done it, or that it was really the committee. He looks straight at a real, costly, genuine act of faithfulness and calls it what it is. That matters, because a kind word that gets denied does not fall to the floor. It goes back to the person who offered it, and they learn not to say the next one.

The second movement is laying it down. Everything in his hands came out of God's hand first, so back it goes, and it goes back gladly rather than shamefully. You were given the strength for those six years before you spent a single night of it, and the same Spirit who is holding you up at four in the morning is the one who put the love for your mother in you in the first place. Scripture is what says that, not me flattering you.

This is exactly the picture John gets in Revelation, and it is worth seeing properly. The elders are wearing crowns. Real ones. Given to them, actually on their heads, not taken off them or argued about. And what they do with them is cast them down before the throne. Nobody snatched those crowns away. Nobody told the elders they were proud for wearing one up the steps. They received, and then they laid down, and both halves are worship.

So when somebody says a good word to you, they are not handing you a bill. They are handing you something to carry to the front. You are permitted to hold it for a moment, look at it, be warmed by it, and say thank you like a grown woman, and then put it where it belongs. And the load in your arms does not get heavier for that, because His word never once made honor a debt, and His Spirit is not standing over you waiting to see whether you take too much of it.

And if the carrying itself has got bigger than one person, say that out loud too, to somebody who can act on it. Your mother's doctor. The care team. Ask what help exists, use the word respite, and let somebody assess it properly, and tell one real person at church a true sentence instead of a brave one. And if the nights have begun to go somewhere heavier than tiredness, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight. That is not a failure of faithfulness. It is faithfulness with its eyes open, and nobody in Scripture ever carried a thing this size alone on purpose.