I Am Not The Woman Who Said It

She was twenty four and she is not here.

You have almost nothing in common with her. Not her opinions, not her politics, not her theology, not what she found funny. If she walked into your kitchen this afternoon you would like her and you would find her exhausting and you would not tell her very much.

And the promise was hers. She stood up and said it, in her voice, out of her understanding, with her whole small confident self.

So when you think about saying it again, something in you says: that is not mine to reissue. She said it. I am somebody else who inherited a house and a name and a set of obligations from a woman I barely remember being.

Before we go on, and this stands at the top always: if you cannot say it today, you are not failing at anything. Nothing here is asking you for anything you do not have, and a day when the words will not come is a real day and not a ruling.

For everybody else, I want to deal with the idea that you lack the standing, because it is the actual obstacle and it is not true.

A new creature

There is a sentence in second Corinthians that says something enormous about change, and I want it for exactly this.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new (2 Corinthians 5:17, King James Version)

A new creature. That is not a mild claim. It is about as large a statement about change as the language will carry.

And here is what matters for you. Nowhere in that passage does the newness disqualify the person from anything they said before. There is no clause about previous commitments being void because the one who made them has been remade.

You are new and still the one who promised, and 2 Corinthians has never once used newness to cancel a person's word. 2 Corinthians 5:17 makes the change total and leaves every promise standing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a changed woman keep her own vow.

If newness voided old words, no believer could hold a promise for more than a few years, and the whole of scripture assumes otherwise. Change is celebrated in the text and continuity is assumed alongside it.

You have continuity through the change, and no verse has ever once made a new creature into a stranger to her own promises. The passage puts the newness and the person in the same body, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds twenty four and forty seven together as one woman.

Both of them are you

Let me put this as plainly as I can, because it is not an abstraction, it is the answer.

The woman at twenty four and the woman standing in the kitchen today are the same person. Not in the sense that nothing changed. Everything changed. In the sense that there is one continuous life running from her to you with no break in it anywhere.

You remember being her. That is the proof. A stranger cannot remember being somebody.

You are one continuous life running from her to this kitchen, and 2 Corinthians has never once used newness to sever a person from her own history. 2 Corinthians 5:17 makes the change total and leaves every promise attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds twenty four and forty seven together as one woman.

And the keeping of her promise for twenty three years has been done by you. Every one of those years, the work was done by the woman she was turning into, not by the one who said it. She said it once. All the rest of it belongs to the one in the kitchen.

Which means, if anything, the standing to say it again belongs more to you than it ever did to her.

You are the one who has actually kept it, and the standing has never once belonged to the woman who only said it. 2 Corinthians 5:17 makes a person new without severing them from their own history, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a woman the authority she thought she had lost.

You made a promise at twenty four and you have carried it since, and the covenant has never once needed the original woman back in the room. It is written that if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps one life continuous through every change in it.

One sentence, from the woman who is here

Here is the assignment and the whole point is that it is said by you and not by her.

Say one sentence of it again, out loud, to God, with today's knowledge in it.

Say it as yourself, at your own age. Do not try to sound like her. Do not apologize for not being her. She is not required and she was never the qualification.

It is written that if any man be in Christ he is a new creature, and the Spirit of God is the one who hands the standing to the person actually standing there. You have more claim on that promise than she ever did, and the keeping has never once been done by anybody else.

Something like: she said it and I have kept it, and I say it again today as who I am now.

Out loud, alone. Not to him, not as an event, nobody needs to know.

And if it will not come today, leave it, and nothing here is asking for more than you have.

You are able to say it in your own voice at your own age, and it has never once required the twenty four year old to be standing there. 2 Corinthians 5:17 makes the person new and leaves the promise attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman says it as herself.