Afraid It Would Be A Performance

You have a good ear for a false note and it has always been aimed at yourself.

That is why you will not do it. Not because you do not mean the promise. Because you can hear, in advance, exactly how it would sound coming out of you on a morning when you feel about seventy per cent of it, and you cannot stand the thought of listening to yourself sound sincere.

Other people would not notice. You know that too and it does not help, because you are not saying it for other people and there is nobody in the room but you.

So the whole thing has been blocked, for something like two years, by a quality control problem.

Before anything else, and it stands at the top of every page in this row: if you cannot say it today, you are not failing at anything. Nothing here is asking you for anything you do not have, and there is no pressure on this page anywhere.

For everybody else, I want to show you that the thing you are protecting is the exact thing being asked for.

Truth in the inward parts

There is a line in Psalm 51 about what God actually wants from a person, and it is not what most people expect.

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts (Psalm 51:6, King James Version)

Truth in the inward parts. Not a good delivery. Not the correct feeling at the correct volume. Truth, in the interior, where nobody else can check it.

That is a startling thing to want from somebody, because it is the only thing that cannot be produced on demand and cannot be faked to a sufficiently attentive listener.

You are being asked for the one thing you are already guarding, and Psalm 51 has never once wanted a performance from anybody. Psalm 51:6 puts the desire on truth in the interior, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman that her own scruple is exactly aligned with what is wanted.

Read what that does to your seventy per cent. If truth is what is wanted, then a woman saying a sentence she seventy per cent feels, while knowing and admitting it is seventy per cent, is offering the truest available version of it.

You have the honest version available and have been withholding it as insufficient, and no verse has ever once required a hundred per cent. The passage asks for truth in the inward parts and says nothing about the intensity of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives an accurate seventy over a manufactured hundred.

The scruple is not the obstacle

Let me say something about that ear of yours, because I do not want you to conclude it is a problem to be got rid of.

An inability to tolerate a false note in oneself is not a defect. It is why people trust a person like that, and it is almost certainly why the promise has held this long, since a woman who cannot bear a false note does not walk away from a true thing quietly.

The scruple is right. What is wrong is one small assumption underneath it: that saying it while feeling only some of it would be false.

It would not be false. It would be accurate, provided you say what is actually there. What would be false is saying it in a big warm voice you do not have this morning, and nobody is asking you to do that.

You are able to say a true thing at the temperature it is actually at, and the temperature has never once been the honesty. Psalm 51:6 wants truth in the interior rather than heat in the delivery, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a scruple from an obstacle.

You made a promise and you have kept it through years you did not fully feel, and the saying of it again has never once required more feeling than the keeping did. It is written that He desires truth in the inward parts, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives a sentence said in a flat voice by a woman who means it.

One sentence, with the seventy in it

Here is the assignment and there is a specific instruction that solves your particular problem.

Say one sentence of it again, out loud, to God, with today's knowledge in it. And put the honesty about the temperature inside the sentence.

That is the fix. If the sentence contains its own accuracy, it cannot be a performance.

You are able to say a sentence that reports its own temperature, and Psalm 51 has never once asked for a warmer voice than a person has. Psalm 51:6 desires truth in the inward parts and says nothing about the delivery, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives an accurate seventy over a manufactured hundred.

Something like: I do not feel all of this today, and I say it anyway, and I have meant it for twenty years.

Say that out loud. Listen to it. You will notice that it does not sound false, because it is not.

Alone, to God. Not to him, not as an event, and nobody needs to know.

You are able to say it with the shortfall named inside it, and a named shortfall has never once made a sentence a performance. Psalm 51:6 asks for truth in the inward parts, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman says an accurate sentence in an ordinary voice.