And Then You Have To Buy Groceries Here

She has thought about the sentence itself perhaps four hundred times and she is not frightened of it.

She could say it. She has said harder things. She has stood in front of people and said things that made a room go completely still, more than once, and she did not shake and she did not lose her nerve, and afterwards she went home and slept.

What she cannot get past is Tuesday.

Because this is a town of about four thousand people and there is one supermarket, and she does her shopping on a Tuesday morning, and if she says the thing on Sunday, then on Tuesday morning at about half past nine she will push a trolley into aisle six and there will be somebody there.

Not a confrontation. Nobody would confront her. This is not that kind of place and they are not those kinds of people.

It is worse than a confrontation. It is a woman she has known for eleven years seeing her at the end of the aisle and then being extremely warm. It is that specific warmth. It is somebody saying good morning in the exact tone that says we are not going to talk about it, and asking after her mother, and meaning it, and going.

It is nine months of that. Because that is how long it takes in a town this size, and she has watched it happen to other people, and she knows the shape of it exactly: not exclusion, not cruelty, but a very slight and permanent adjustment in about forty relationships that nobody ever names.

She said out loud in her kitchen last week, to nobody, that she can preach a hard word and cannot face the fruit and vegetables.

She was half laughing when she said it. Then she stopped laughing, because it is true, and because she realized that she has been treating this as an unworthy thing to be afraid of, and has therefore never once let herself take it seriously or bring it to God.

What he told a timid man he already had

There is a line Paul writes from prison to a young man who was, by every indication in that letter, naturally timid. He is not writing to a bold person. He is writing to somebody who needed stirring up.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.2 Timothy 1:7

Look at the tense first. Hath not given. Hath given. It is entirely about what has already been handed over, and there is not one imperative in the sentence. Paul is not telling him to be braver. He is telling him what is already in his possession.

And then look at the three things, because the third one is the one for you.

Power, and love, and a sound mind. The third word means soundness, self mastery, a head that stays your own. It is the ability to hold your own mind steady, and it is listed as a gift alongside power, which tells you that Scripture does not think steadiness is a lesser thing than courage.

So hear this, standing in your own kitchen: what you are dreading is not an unworthy fear, and you have been given the exact thing that meets it. That is not my encouragement; it is what His word says is already in a timid man's possession, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a list of three and lands it in a woman who has been ashamed of being frightened of a supermarket.

Now let me take the shame off it directly, because the shame is doing more damage than the fear.

You have been comparing the two fears and finding yourself ridiculous. Big fear: standing in front of a room and saying a hard thing. Small fear: a woman being warm at you by the fruit. And because the second one is smaller, you have concluded that being stopped by it is contemptible.

It is not contemptible and it is not even irrational. The room lasts forty minutes. The aisle lasts nine months. You are not more afraid of the smaller thing, you are more afraid of the longer thing, and that is a completely reasonable weighting that any honest person would make.

Sustained low grade loss is harder to carry than one high intensity hour. Everybody knows this about physical pain and almost nobody applies it to social pain, and you have been holding yourself to a standard that nobody would apply to anything else.

You are not being cowardly about groceries. Scripture nowhere ranks fears by their dignity, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been telling you that this one is beneath you.

And now the part this message will not do. I am not telling you to say it. Not on Sunday, not at all, and there is no paragraph coming where a silence of yours becomes disobedience. That is between you and God and a room I have never sat in.

What I am handing you is what Paul handed a young man: not an instruction, an inventory. Power, love, and a sound mind, already given, already yours, available on a Tuesday morning at half past nine in aisle six whatever you decide about Sunday.