He Put His Own Worst Years In

The version she tells is nine minutes long and she has given it about thirty times.

It is a good testimony. It moves. It has a hard childhood, a stretch in her twenties she describes as lost, a night in a car park in her thirties that is the turn, and then what has happened since, which is a great deal and is genuinely remarkable.

Everything in it is true.

And there are four years in the middle of it that are not in it at all.

She does not lie about them. She has a sentence that covers them, and the sentence is I was a long way from anything good, and it is accurate and it takes about two seconds and then the story moves.

What actually happened in those four years is that she did real damage to specific people. Not to herself. That is the part that would be manageable, and audiences have a category for a woman who wrecked her own life. This is the other kind, and there are two people who are still dealing with the consequences of decisions she made, and she knows their names and one of them will not speak to her.

She has made it right where it can be made right. Genuinely, over years, at cost.

And she still puts I was a long way from anything good in the middle of a nine minute testimony thirty times, and lately something has begun to happen when she says it.

It has started to feel like the lie. Not a lie. The lie, singular, the one thing in nine minutes of true material that is doing work she did not authorize, which is making thirty rooms think she is talking about herself.

He wrote his own worst years into the argument

Let me be fair to the sentence before I take it apart, because it was not invented out of vanity.

There are people in those four years who did not consent to be in your testimony. Naming what you did in detail from a platform makes them characters in your redemption, and some of them are still living with it, and a woman who does that has taken something that is not hers to spend. Your instinct to protect them is right and it stays right.

The trouble is that a long way from anything good protects them and also protects you, and you have not been able to separate the two, and that is what has started to sound wrong in your own mouth.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as permission: the man who wrote most of those letters put his own worst years in writing, in the middle of an argument, by name. That is not my kind reading of thirty tellings, it is what stands written in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, and the same Holy Spirit who carried it has been in the room every one of those thirty times.

Read it. It comes immediately after the list of resurrection witnesses, at the highest point of the chapter.

For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.1 Corinthians 15:9

Because I persecuted the church of God.

Not I was a long way from anything good. Not I was lost. The actual thing, in the active voice, with the object named: the people he hurt were the very people he is now writing to.

And notice where he puts it. He is not doing a testimony slot. He is in the middle of the most important argument in the letter, and he stops and says what he was.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a way to say it that costs nothing: you do not have to choose between protecting them and telling the truth about yourself, because the written word gives you a man who names his own worst years without narrating anybody else's, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept that sentence in the record where every reader could see it.

And the honest boundary, because this house does not overclaim. That kind of self-damaging detail is an argument about invention and one consideration among a number, and it does not settle everything. Nobody should hand it to you as a proof.

What it hands you tonight is a form of words. He said what he did, not what was done to him, and he did not describe a single one of his victims.