The Song She Turns Off in the Car

It comes on at the roundabout by the tire place, which it has done maybe forty times in six years, and it is a good song and she has always liked it.

She gets about eleven seconds in.

There is a bar in the second line, and it is not a lyric and it is not a word, it is a shape in the melody, a little turn upward, and Hannah has never once got past it. Her hand goes to the dial before she has decided anything. The car is quiet. She checks her mirror and takes the left.

That is all that happens. It takes under a second and there is no expression on her face and she has never in six years had to explain it to anybody, because the only people who have been in the car with her when it came on were her sister, who was talking, and a colleague, who was looking at his phone.

She would tell you she just does not care for that song anymore. If pressed she would tell you it reminds her of a difficult time. Both of those are true in the way that a small true thing can stand in front of a large one.

Something was done to her. That is the whole of what I am going to say about it and I am not going to ask her, or you, for one syllable more.

And she has carried something ever since that has all the weight of guilt and none of the origin of it.

I want to be exact about who I am talking to in this article, because on this site that matters more than anything else. I am not talking to somebody who did a thing and cannot get it off. That reader is real and there are articles here written for them and they are not this one. I am talking to the person who is carrying something that came out of another person's actions, and who has never been able to explain to themselves why they feel like the one who owes something.

If that is you, then before anything else: it was not yours. It was never yours. Nothing you did, said, wore, drank, thought or failed to do made you a contributor to it, and this article will not at any point ask you to examine that. There is nothing to examine.

Two different words

Here is something almost nobody gets told, and it took a long time to be handed to me.

The Bible does not use one word for this. It uses two, and they do two completely different jobs, and English has flattened them into one lump and a great many people are being crushed under the lump.

There is guilt, which is a legal condition. Guilt attaches to an actor because of an act. It is about what you did. It has a remedy and the remedy is forgiveness, and forgiveness needs a doer to forgive.

And there is shame, which is not about an act at all. Shame is about standing and exposure. It is the sense of being lessened in the eyes of others and yourself. And here is the part that matters for the car: shame can be inflicted. It transfers. A person can be made to carry disgrace by an event they had no part in authoring, and the Hebrew Scriptures know that perfectly well and say so repeatedly.

So when a person carrying the second thing goes looking for help and is handed the medicine for the first, nothing happens. Of course nothing happens. They are being asked to confess their way out of something they did not do.

You are carrying a category of thing the Bible has a separate word for, and it was never the kind that gets confessed. Isaiah 54:4 uses the shame word and not the guilt word, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written distinction and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how clearly you can feel the difference at a roundabout.

And I want to say this plainly, because a lot of good people have muddled it with good intentions. Nobody needs to forgive anybody in order to be clean. That is not the order of operations, it is not in the verse, and it is not in this article. Whatever you do or do not do about the person who acted is entirely between you and God on a timetable that is yours, and it has no bearing whatsoever on the state you are in right now.

You have a cleanness that does not wait behind anything you are being asked to feel about anybody else. It is written into the promise with no conditions attached, and His Spirit is the one carrying an unconditional thing into a life, which is why nothing about your progress or lack of it changes the state.

Who Isaiah 54 is speaking to

Now, context, because it decides everything here.

Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame.

Read the chapter around it and you find that the person being addressed is not somebody who did something. The whole of Isaiah 54 is spoken to one who was left. The imagery all the way through is of somebody abandoned and disgraced by another party's action, and the chapter is God coming to that person and speaking to them about their standing.

That is who the promise is aimed at. It is not a general encouragement borrowed for the occasion. The one being addressed in that chapter is the one who had it done to them.

You were the person that chapter was written for, and the address on the envelope has your situation on it. Isaiah 54:4 sits inside a chapter spoken over somebody acted upon, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one testifying to it in a person now.

I want to put one thing here in the middle where nobody can skip past it, and I want to say it warmly, because on this subject it matters more than usual. Getting a person alongside you is part of what God is doing and not a lesser version of it. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor, one who knows this ground. You do not have to tell anybody the whole thing, or any of it, before you make that call, and a good one will never require it of you. And if the nights have gone long, if the thinking has traveled past the ache and out toward wishing you were not here, call or text 988 or your local crisis line tonight and let a human being be with you in it. None of that is a failure of faith. God has always worked through people.

Not a forecast

There is one more thing in that verse, and it is the difference between a promise and a prediction.

Thou shalt not be ashamed.

Now, a person hears that and reasonably assumes it is a forecast about feelings, and so they check their feelings against it, and their feelings say something else, and they conclude the verse has not worked on them.

That is not what that sentence is. It is a declaration about standing. It is God stating what your position is, in the way a court states what a person's position is, and a position is not a temperature.

Which means the reading in your chest is not the instrument for measuring this. It never was. You can be a person whose standing is entirely unashamed and who still reaches for the dial at eleven seconds, and there is no contradiction there at all, because those two things are not even in the same category.

You are unashamed in the only place where that word means anything, and the reaching for the dial has never once been evidence about it. Scripture says thou shalt not be ashamed as a statement of standing, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a car, which is why a settled position holds on a road where nothing at all has changed.

And I am not going to tell you that you get past the second line next time. I am not going to hand you a schedule for when you will hear that song and feel nothing, because that would be me promising something I have no right to promise, and because a person who was handed a schedule and then missed it would conclude they had failed at something. There is nothing here to fail at.

You are clean right now with your hand on the dial, and the hand on the dial does not testify. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.