She Still Asks Permission

Tasha bought a coat in October and she has thought about it every day since.

It cost forty-one dollars. It is a perfectly ordinary coat. She has her own money, from her own job, in her own account, and there is not one person on earth with any claim on the forty-one dollars.

She stood in that store for nineteen minutes.

Here is what was happening in those nineteen minutes. She was running a conversation. Not out loud, and not with anybody present. She was checking the coat against a voice, and the voice was saying the things it always said, and she was assembling the reasons she would give, and organizing where she would put it so as not to make a point of it, and then, at some stage, she remembered that there is nobody to give the reasons to.

She bought it. She has worn it four times.

Tasha has been out six weeks. She has her own place, a friend she stays with on weekends, a job she had before and kept. Everybody who knows anything about it is relieved and glad and some of them have said so more than once.

And she cannot buy a coat without an internal committee meeting.

It is not only coats. It is whether to say yes to a Thursday. It is what time she goes to bed. It is whether to answer a text now or in an hour, which she deliberates over like it is a legal matter. Last week a woman at church asked whether she would like to help with the food on Sunday and Tasha heard herself say, "Let me check," and then walked away and realized she had nothing to check.

Here is the moment it caught.

Her friend, driving her home, said, "You want to stop for food?"

And Tasha said, "I'm fine either way, whatever you want."

And her friend, who is not a delicate person, said, "Tash. I asked what you want."

And Tasha sat in that car and could not produce an answer. Not because she did not know. Because the part of her that produces answers has not been switched on for a long time and does not come back the day the door closes behind you.

You know this. Out, and still checking. Still running the meeting. Still saying let me check when there is nothing to check, and hating the sound of it in your own mouth.

Forty years of being led

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you how long this lasts. I do not know. I am not going to tell you what your situation was, and I am not giving anybody a verdict. And I am not going to suggest, in any wording however gentle, that a woman six weeks out ought to be further along than she is, because that idea has done a great deal of harm to people who were doing fine.

What I will do is read you one sentence Moses says at the start of Deuteronomy 8, forty years after the leaving.

And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness.Deuteronomy 8:2

Two things in that, and the second one is for you.

First: forty years. Not forty days. The stretch between coming out and arriving was longer than most of the people walking it had been alive. Nobody in Scripture treats that as a scandal or a failure. It is simply the length of the road.

You are not behind schedule at six weeks, and there is no schedule anywhere in the text for anybody to be behind. Deuteronomy 8:2 names forty years without a syllable of apology, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a car outside a restaurant.

Second, and this is the one. All the way which the LORD thy God led thee. Moses is telling them to look back and see that the leading was happening the whole time. Not just at the sea. Not just at the good bits. All the way, including the stretches where it did not look like leading at all, where it looked like wandering, where a person inside it would have said with total sincerity that nobody was steering.

You have been led through every one of the six weeks, including the nineteen minutes in the coat store. It is written that He led them all the way, and the Holy Spirit is what turns an ancient backward look into a present assurance.

The committee is not a character flaw

Now let me be careful here, because this is exactly where somebody gets hurt.

What Tasha does in a store is not a spiritual problem. It is not a lack of faith and it is not her failing to walk in her freedom, and I am not going to use either of those phrases about her, because both of them are ways of making a person responsible for the speed of their own healing.

She spent a long time in a situation where every small decision had to be defended. So she got very good at defending small decisions. That skill did not evaporate when the door closed. Skills do not work like that. She is running a procedure that kept her safe for years, in a place where it is no longer needed, and the procedure does not know that yet.

You are not failing at freedom by having a body that has not caught up to your circumstances, and nothing in Scripture makes freedom a performance. Galatians 5:1 speaks of Christ making people free as an accomplished act rather than as a standard to meet, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a finished gift from being turned into an examination.

And I want to name the specific sting in this, because it is not the deliberating. It is the moment in the car. It is being asked what you want and finding out there is a delay in the answer, and knowing exactly why there is a delay, and hating what that says about how long you were in there.

You have not lost the part of you that wants things, and it is not gone, it is out of use. Psalm 23:3 has Him restoring a soul rather than replacing one, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that restoring at whatever pace it actually takes.

And say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If six weeks out has taken you somewhere darker than confused, or if there are hours where being out feels worse than being in did, do not sit with that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your friend, someone at church, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you anything at all about what you came out of. That is me refusing to leave you sitting in that car by yourself.