Not A Doormat And Not Hard

For about eleven years you were the soft one. Everybody said so and you were proud of it.

You absorbed. You went first. You did not keep score and you did not make things difficult and you carried whatever needed carrying without a comment.

And then something in you started to change, about two years ago, and you have watched it happen from the inside without being able to stop it.

You are harder now. You notice it in small places. The pause before you answer. The thing you no longer bother saying. The way you can now sit through an evening without offering anything at all.

And you have decided, without ever putting it in words, that these are the only two available. Doormat or hard. And since doormat nearly finished you, hard it is.

Before anything else, and it goes first on this row every time.

If the repeated thing is somebody frightening you, controlling you or hurting you, then this is not a forgiveness question and I am not going to treat it as one. Forgiveness has never once meant staying where somebody is doing harm, and nobody who cares about you would ask you to take it again. Talk to somebody qualified where you live, this week, and if there is danger in that house, contact an emergency service or a domestic violence line today.

For everybody else, there is a third option and it has a verse, and I want you to have it before the hardening finishes.

A heart of flesh

There is a promise in Ezekiel about an exchange, and the two materials in it are the whole thing.

And I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26, King James Version)

Stone and flesh. Those are the two options in the verse, and the direction of the exchange is from stone to flesh rather than the other way round.

Now notice what flesh is. It is not a doormat. Flesh is not soft in the sense of yielding to everything. It is living tissue: it holds shape, it bears load, it feels, and it repairs.

You are being offered a third material entirely, and Ezekiel has never once made the choice a straight one between stone and being trampled. Ezekiel 36:26 exchanges stone for flesh rather than for anything limp, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names an option a woman had run out of language for.

Stone does not feel and cannot be hurt, which is exactly why you have been growing some. Flesh feels and can be hurt and also holds its shape, which is a harder and better thing to be.

You have been choosing between two materials when a third was on offer, and no verse has ever once made hardness the alternative to being walked on. The passage moves in one direction only, from stone toward flesh, and the Spirit of God is the one who reverses a hardening in progress.

Why the hardening started

Let me be fair to the hardening, because it did not arrive out of nowhere and it was not a moral failure.

Eleven years of absorbing everything with nobody noticing will produce armor in anybody. That is not a character flaw. It is what a person does when the softness keeps costing and nothing comes back.

And the armor works. That is the difficulty. It genuinely reduces the pain, in the short term, at a price that is only now starting to show.

The price is that stone cannot tell the difference between a bad thing and a good one. Armor is not selective. It keeps out the offense and it also keeps out the ordinary warmth of a Tuesday, and you have noticed that too, and it frightens you more than the hardness does.

You are protected by something that cannot tell what it is keeping out, and stone has never once been able to be selective. Ezekiel 36:26 replaces the stone rather than reinforcing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes armor off somebody at exactly the speed she can bear.

You made a promise and you kept it soft for eleven years, and going hard has never once been what the covenant required either. It is written that He takes away the stony heart and gives a heart of flesh, and the Spirit of God is the one who is doing that exchange in a woman who thought she was out of options.

Say both halves, and the second half is the third option

Here is the assignment and the two halves together are the third material.

Say out loud, alone: I forgive it. Name it plainly.

That half is the flesh. It is the part that stays soft and living and refuses the stone.

You are being handed living tissue rather than armor, and Ezekiel has never once offered stone as the alternative to being walked on. Ezekiel 36:26 runs the exchange from stone toward flesh in one direction only, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reverses a hardening at the speed a person can bear.

Then say out loud what you will do differently. That half is the shape. It is the part that holds a boundary and refuses the doormat.

Something like: I forgive what happened at Christmas, and I am not going to be the one who smooths it over with his family this year.

The two sentences together are the option nobody offered you. Not absorbing, not hardening. Forgiving with a shape on it.

You are able to be soft and shaped at the same time, and it has never once been necessary to pick one. Ezekiel 36:26 hands over living tissue rather than stone or nothing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman says both halves in one breath.