You Do Not Have to Get Smaller

She was fifteen and she was standing on the third riser, second from the end, and the woman next to her turned round with a laugh and said, goodness, you are loud.

That is all. Four words, said kindly, in a warm room, by somebody who liked her. There was a piano going and a heater ticking under the window and somebody's little brother running up and down the aisle with a hymn book. Nobody heard it except her. Nobody in that hall would remember it by the following Thursday, and the woman who said it went home and thought about her shopping.

She stayed exactly where she was, and for the next verse she sang at about sixty percent. Just enough to be part of it. Not enough to be found.

It worked immediately, which is the whole problem. Nobody turned round again. And a fifteen year old with a good ear learns that lesson in one rehearsal and does not need a second.

It spread the way these things spread. Not loudly. She started telling stories with the ending trimmed off, because the full version took up too much table. She stopped saying the thing she actually thought and started saying a smaller version of it with a question mark on the end, so it could be taken back. She got good news once and mentioned it the way you mention the weather. Laughing quieter. Wanting less out loud. Choosing the beige coat.

By twenty nine she was known as easy to be around. She was genuinely proud of that. It was the thing people said about her, and she had worked for it, and she could not have told you what it had cost because she had paid it in installments so small that no single one of them ever hurt.

Then one Thursday she is on a riser again, in a different hall, twenty something years later, and the alto line goes up to a note that she has always been able to sing, and something in her chest gets ready to give it everything, and she catches herself. Automatically. Sixty percent. Not a decision. A reflex now, worn smooth, older than the reason for it.

And now I am going to stop calling her she.

Because you know your own sixty percent. You could tell me the exact size you have agreed to be in your family, and the slightly different size you are at work, and the very small size you become around one specific person. You have a system, and it is beautifully maintained, and you run it all day.

You know the tired that comes off it too. Not the tired of doing too much. The other one. The particular exhaustion of being loved at a size you had to become.

And here is the ache underneath all of it, the one you would not say out loud even now. You have got so good at this that you genuinely do not know what your own full size is any more. You could not show me if I asked.

Somebody has already heard your actual voice

I am not going to try to talk you out of this. You cannot be argued into being yourself, and anyone who tries is just handing you a new set of instructions to obey.

So let me start by naming what you actually did, honestly, because you were never a coward. Nowhere in Scripture is a child who learned how to stay loved called that, and His Spirit, who was in that hall on the third riser, has never once used the word about you either.

You made a trade. You noticed, very young and very accurately, that a smaller version of you got kept, and you did what any sensible person does when they have found the price of belonging. You paid it. Every day, in installments. That was not weakness. It was a child being clever about staying loved, and it worked, and I am not going to sneer at something that worked.

It just costs more than it did.

Now here is what is actually true about you, and I am going to hand it to you rather than defend it.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:10

Workmanship. It is a maker's word. The kind of thing an artist says looking at the corner of a canvas nobody else has noticed yet.

Look at what is being said about the sequence, because it is the opposite of the way you have been living. The good works were prepared beforehand, and then you were made to walk in them. Made for them. Sized for them. Nothing about you is an accident that needs sanding down before you can be useful. The volume you were given is the volume the work requires. And His Spirit went out ahead of you and prepared that work, never for a folded version of the person He made.

But I promised I would not argue, so let me just show you something instead.

There was a man sitting under a fig tree, minding his own business, doing nothing anyone would put in a book. His friend came and found him and said, we have found the one Moses wrote about, and he is from Nazareth. And this man said, out loud, skeptical, unpolished, can anything good come out of Nazareth? That is not a devout sentence. That is a man saying exactly what he thinks, at full volume, with no question mark on the end.

His friend said, come and see.

And when Jesus saw him coming, before a word had been exchanged between them, He said, here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false.

The man stopped. And he said the only thing anyone can say at that point. How do you know me?

And Jesus said: I saw you under the fig tree. Before Philip called you.

That is the whole thing, and it never gets old. He was seen at full size, skeptical remark and all, before he did anything, before he was recruited, before he had cleaned himself up or made himself easier. He was not admired for a version of himself he had assembled. He was recognized, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, sitting under a tree with nobody watching.

That is what has already happened to you. There is no version of you that God is meeting for the first time. He has never once been introduced to a smaller edition and been disappointed by the real one. He watched you learn sixty percent, on a riser, at fifteen, in a warm hall with a heater ticking, and He did not think less of you for learning it, and He has been waiting a long time to hear the other forty.