Turned Down To Stay Welcome

The worst part is that it worked. Chinelo would want that said first, because every version of this story that leaves it out is a lie.

She turned herself down at about thirty-four, deliberately, over a period of maybe eighteen months. Not because anybody demanded it. Because she noticed the pattern: that she got invited to a thing once, and warmly, and then not again, and that this had happened enough times to stop being coincidence.

So she adjusted. She learned to hold it. She learned to let a subject go past. She learned, and this was the hardest one, to be in a room where somebody said something she profoundly disagreed with and to let the moment close.

And the invitations kept coming.

That is the part nobody tells you. It was not a tragic sacrifice that failed. It worked exactly as intended. She has been part of things for fifteen years that the previous version of her would have been invited to once.

She has friends because of it. Real ones. There are people who love her now who would have found her exhausting at thirty-three and who would never have got as far as finding out what else she was.

So when she looks at the trade she cannot simply be sorry about it, and any message that asks her to would be asking her to be sorry about her own friendships.

But she was sitting on the edge of a stage in June, after everybody had gone, and a sentence arrived that she has not been able to shift.

Which of me do they actually like?

You have your own version. You turned something down and the room warmed up and you have never turned it back, and you cannot tell any more whether that was wisdom or a price.

Nobody here is going to tell you it was one or the other. It was almost certainly both, and most real decisions are.

But there is a verse about what has been underneath the whole thing, and it is not about volume at all.

Paul describes it as a necessity, not an enthusiasm

There is a sentence Paul writes about his own compulsion, and it is startlingly unglamorous.

For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of: for necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel.1 Corinthians 9:16

Read what he is actually doing there. He is refusing credit. Somebody has apparently suggested that this is something he does well and deserves recognition for, and he is declining, on the grounds that a man under compulsion is not exactly volunteering.

Necessity is laid upon me. It is laid, passively, by somebody else. He is describing a load rather than a passion.

And the woe is unto me clause is not God threatening him and I want that said plainly, because that sentence has been used to frighten people. It is Paul describing his own interior state: that for him, not doing this is its own misery, in the way a musician who stops playing goes strange. It is a fact about him, reported in the first person, not a punishment held over anybody.

And what you carry is a load rather than a personality trait. That is not my softening: the written word puts it in the passive voice as something laid on rather than something generated, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman on the edge of a stage in June.

And you have nothing to prove and nothing to apologize for. The word has Paul refusing both the credit and the blame in the same sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a genuinely available position rather than a clever piece of humility.

What the turning down actually bought

Here is the honest accounting, and it has two columns and both of them are real.

In one column: fifteen years of friendships, rooms she is still in, a great deal of good done quietly by somebody who stayed welcome. That is not nothing and it is not a consolation prize. Some of the best things in her life are in that column.

In the other: she does not know which of her is loved, and that not-knowing has been quietly running underneath every one of those friendships for fifteen years.

Notice that the second column does not cancel the first. This is not a story where she should have stayed as she was. The thirty-three year old version was genuinely hard work sometimes, and adjusting was not cowardice, it was growing up, and most people do some version of it.

The question is not whether she turned down. It is whether anybody has ever seen the other setting, because if nobody has, then the not-knowing is guaranteed, and it will keep running for another fifteen years.

And you are fully known already. The word says the Lord knoweth them that are His, and He is described as looking on the heart rather than on the presentation, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are, which is the one place where the question is already answered.

And you have not been deceiving anybody. The word says let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, and it treats the adjusting of speech to a room as ordinary wisdom rather than as dishonesty, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hold that without guilt.

Nobody is telling you to turn it back up

I want to be very plain, because a message like this could easily end with somebody deciding to be their unfiltered self at the next thing, and that would go badly and I would be responsible.

Do not do that. The adjusting was wisdom, and undoing wisdom in order to test a friendship is not courage.

And nobody is handing you a level. This site is not going to tell you what the correct setting is, because there is not one, and anybody who tells you there is has never actually had to be in a room.

What is available is smaller. It is that one person, at some point, could see the other setting, in a room where it is safe, chosen by you, at a time you pick. Not the whole room. One person.

That is not a plan for tonight. It is simply worth knowing that the not-knowing has a cause and the cause is fixable, slowly, by degrees, and does not require anybody to blow anything up.

And you are not required to perform to keep what you have. Nothing in Scripture makes a person's welcome contingent on their management of themselves, and the Spirit of God has never once loved a reduced version of anybody.