Free Is Not the Same as Fixed

Nine months in the new house, and her foot still skips the fourth stair.

In the old place the fourth stair was rotten. It gave under the heel and groaned like something in pain, and if you were carrying a basket you went down hard, and she went down hard twice. So she learned to step long, fourth to fifth, without thinking about it, the way you learn to duck under a low beam. She did it in the dark. She did it half asleep. She did it holding a baby on her hip for four years.

The new house has good stairs. Every one of them is solid oak and none of them move. She has checked, more than once, standing on that fourth step with her whole weight, bouncing slightly, feeling nothing but floor. And still, every night at eleven, going up in the dark, her leg lengthens the stride and clears it, and she is on the landing before she notices she did it again.

The first few times it was funny. It is not funny now. It has started to mean something to her, the way small things do at eleven at night. She stands on the landing and she thinks: I did the hard part. I got out. I signed the papers and I carried the boxes and I have not been back. So why does my body still live in a house I left?

You said last time was the last time.

And here you are, and something is still lengthening the stride, and you have decided what it means. You have decided it means the leaving never really took.

Two different things wearing one word

I am going to separate two things that have been jammed together in you, and once they are apart, you are going to be able to breathe for the first time in months.

Free is a place you are standing. Fixed is a repair that takes time.

They are not the same thing, they do not arrive on the same day, and the whole weight you are carrying comes from having been taught, somewhere, by someone who probably meant well, that if the second one is unfinished then the first one never happened. Look for that lesson in Scripture and it is not there, and the Spirit who is standing with you on that dark landing at eleven o'clock is not the one who taught it to you.

Look at how Scripture speaks about where you are standing.

Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.2 Corinthians 3:17

Present tense. Not where the Spirit of the Lord has completed His remodelling. Not where the person has stopped flinching. Where He is, there is freedom, and the freedom is a property of the room rather than a grade awarded to the person standing in it. Your reflexes have no vote in this. He is here, so freedom is here, so you are in it.

Now let me name what has actually been happening to you, because I do not want to lift you before I have told the truth about the low place.

There are two accounts being kept in you, and only one of them is honest. The honest account has your leaving in it. The day you told someone. The number you deleted. The night you drove past and did not stop. Nine months. Nine hundred small refusals nobody applauded, most of them made while you felt nothing at all.

The other account only records the stumbles. And that is the one you read at eleven at night, and it is the one you believe, and it has convinced you that the woman on the landing is a fraud who has fooled some good people. That is why you brace when someone says they are proud of you. That is why praise makes you feel further from God rather than nearer.

That second account is not an audit. It is an accusation with a spreadsheet, and it has been running your evenings.

Consider Israel. God brought them out of Egypt in a night. The going out was one act, complete, finished, legal, done. And then they walked into the desert, and within weeks they were talking about the food back in Egypt, flinching at every rumor, wanting to appoint a captain and go back. Their freedom was a fact from the first night. Their formation took forty years. Nobody reading that story concludes that they were never actually out.

Egypt left them in one night. It took considerably longer for Egypt to leave them, and God did not revoke the exodus while He waited.

And I want to tell you what the accusing account has actually been costing you, because the payments have been going out quietly and nobody has ever totaled them for you.

It costs you the day after. Every stumble is followed by a stretch of hours in which the verdict feels already handed down, back at the beginning, so you behave like someone at the beginning. You avoid prayer, because prayer feels like turning up at an office after being let go. You cancel the coffee with the friend who knows. You stop counting the days, because the count feels like a lie now. And that stretch of hours, the one where you disqualify yourself, is what does the real damage. Not the stumble. The exile you go into afterwards, which nobody sentenced you to.

It costs you the good evidence too. A genuine record of God's work in you has been thrown out because one line in it displeased you. If someone brought me books like that, with the credits struck out and only the losses left in, I would tell them plainly that they are not looking at their accounts. They are looking at a case built against them, and it is not even accurate.

And it costs you help, which is the cruellest part. People who believe a stumble undoes everything are the same people who stop telling anyone, and secrecy is the exact climate the old thing needs to grow in.

So let us put that account down. It was never yours, and it was never true, and the day you leave it on the table is the day the evenings change. You are not standing in a courtroom at eleven at night. There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus; that is Romans 8:1, and the honest book has been kept all along by the Spirit, not by you.