Nobody Thinks It Is Women

Every talk Priya has ever sat through on this subject has been addressed to men.

Every single one. The Sunday evening series when she was nineteen. The two chapters in the book somebody gave her at university. The men's breakfast her brother went to and came back from talking about honestly and openly, which she was glad about, genuinely, and which she thought about for four days afterward in a way he will never know.

The word is always brothers. Guys. Men, this one's for you. Then a joke, gently landed, so nobody is crushed.

And Priya sits in row eleven at twenty-nine years old and she has never once, not in a decade, heard anybody in any room say the word sister in that sentence.

So what she has concluded, without ever deciding to, is not that she is bad. It is stranger and colder than that.

She has concluded that she is a category error.

There are men who struggle with this and there is a whole apparatus for them: talks, books, apps, groups, a language, a joke to release the pressure. And then there is whatever she is, which has no name, and no room, and no talk, and which she has therefore been carrying entirely alone since she was twenty.

She could not raise a hand. There is no hand to raise. You cannot ask a question in a room where the subject has been defined in a way that does not include you.

I am not even in the wrong group. I am not in a group.

And here is where I stop talking about Priya, because you are a woman and this is yours and you have never heard it said out loud by anybody, and half of what you carry is not the thing itself. It is being unnamed.

So let me name it, plainly, first, before anything else. Women carry this. Many women. Ordinary, faithful, capable women who lead things and love God, and it is not rare, and it is not a strange variant of a men's problem. It is yours and it is real and you are not a category error.

The word over you is already past tense

Let me put the strongest thing down first, because you have been waiting a decade for somebody to say anything at all.

You are not defined by this and you never have been. There is a word already spoken over you, and it is not a hope for the future, it is a completed statement about you, and it is written in the past tense on purpose:

And such were some of you: but you are washed, but you are sanctified, but you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.1 Corinthians 6:11

Look hard at the tenses in that verse, because it is one of the boldest sentences in the whole letter.

Such were some of you. Past. Closed. Filed. Whatever the list before it said, it is a description of a former address rather than a current one.

Then three things in the present, in a row, all done to you rather than by you: washed, sanctified, justified. And then the two names it happens in: the Lord Jesus, and the Spirit of our God.

So the verdict on you is finished and it was written before you started managing anything, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own encouragement, and God's Spirit is not standing at the edge of a room you were never invited into.

Being unnamed is its own weight

Now let me deal with the second thing you carry, because nobody has ever separated the two for you.

There is the thing itself. And then there is ten years of sitting in rooms where it is discussed as though you are not in them, which is a completely different injury, and it is the one that has made this so heavy.

Because unnamed things grow. A thing with a name has edges. It can be talked about, prayed about, brought into a room. A thing with no name expands to whatever size the silence allows, and you have been supplying that silence yourself, out of a reasonable fear that speaking would make you the only one.

You would not be the only one. You would be the first one in that room to say it, which is a different and much braver thing, and you are not required to do it today.

What you are handed today is this: you are already washed and already sanctified and already justified, and that was not administered to a category, it was administered to you. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can stand up in rather than something you concede.

And the practical half, because a message without it has failed you: there is real help and none of it is small faith. A woman counselor who works with this specifically, and they exist. A doctor if the low afterward has got heavy or the nights are gone. One friend, chosen by you, told in daylight. And nobody, ever, has the right to make telling a husband or a leader the price of your freedom. That may be right, with wisdom and in time. It is not a toll at a gate.