I Have Started Noticing Which Yes Is Which

The invitations come now. Not many, and not large, but enough that she has begun to notice a pattern in her own answers.

She is good at this. That is not immodesty, it is the situation: she can do the thing and people ask her, and she says yes most of the time and means it.

But about a year ago she caught something. A woman asked her to come and do it for four people in a back room, and a church asked her the same week for a Saturday, and she noticed that the yes she gave the church came faster and warmer than the yes she gave the woman. Both were yeses. Both were honest. They were not the same yes.

Since then she cannot stop seeing it. Every invitation now arrives with a second question attached: who is this one for? And often she genuinely cannot tell, because the two motives arrive at the same moment wearing the same clothes.

She has not said no to anything on these grounds. She has just started to feel like somebody with a hidden ledger who cannot read her own handwriting.

If you have started catching yourself, come and sit at the table. Nobody who does this publicly is going to be criticized here.

Noticing is not the same as being caught out

Let us name what has actually happened, because she has read it as an exposure and it is not.

A year ago she could not see the difference between two yeses. Now she can. That is a gain in sight, not a decline in character. The second motive was almost certainly there before she could see it, in every year she felt clean, and the only thing that has changed is the visibility.

But she has treated the new sight as a verdict, and the verdict has made her suspicious of every honest thing she does, which is the reverse of what sight is for.

You are not compromised. Nothing you have started noticing about your own motives has ever been a ruling against you. I am not saying it to smooth over something real. Scripture says whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men (Colossians 3:23), which gives the work an addressee rather than a purity test, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a woman reading her own answers back.

The instruction is an addressee, not an audit

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody who works in public.

Read what the verse actually asks a person to do, because it is a redirection and not an inspection.

And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.Colossians 3:23

As to the Lord. That is not a command to first establish that no other motive is present. It is a command about where the work is addressed while it is being done, which is something a person can actually do, in real time, with mixed motives still in the room.

And whatsoever ye do. The four in a back room and the Saturday at the church are the same category in that sentence. Neither is the spiritual one.

You may address the work rather than audit yourself, and Scripture gives you a direction instead of a test. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman with two invitations open in front of her.

Nothing here is against public work

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page that treats the Saturday as the corrupt one and the back room as the pure one.

It does not work like that. The people at the church on Saturday are real people, the four in the back room are real people, and the size of a room has never determined the honesty of a yes. Some of the most self serving work happens in front of four, and some of the most costly happens in front of four hundred.

And the invitations are not a temptation she is failing. She is being asked because she is good at it, and that is what happens when a person is good at something.

You do not need a platform for this to be real. It was given to you, not to an audience. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the profit is of the people in front of you regardless of how many, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a woman's success at reading her own handwriting, who keeps the work clean.

And if this year has cost more than the friends at that table know, if sleep has gone, if the invitations have started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.