Do Not Get Above Your Raising

The letter has been open in Della's hand from the mailbox to the porch, which is about ninety steps, and she has read it four times in that distance.

The community college wants her to teach the fall course in the thing she has done since she was eleven. Two nights a week. Her name on the schedule. There is a line in the second paragraph that says the department has watched her work for years, which is a strange sentence to read while standing in your own yard with the dog looking at you.

She gets up on the porch and sits on the top step with the letter on her knee. The valley below the house has gone gold the way it does in the second week of October and there is a truck somewhere down the road that you can hear and not see.

And Della says out loud, to the dog and to the yard and to nobody: "Well. Ain't much."

Then, because the sentence felt too short, she finishes it the way she always finishes it. "They probably asked everybody else first."

Nobody is on the porch. That is what to notice. There is no one to say it to, no one whose feelings she is sparing, no one who might think she has an inflated notion of herself. The trimming happens anyway, in an empty yard, before the good news has been in her hands ten minutes. She did not decide to say it. It arrived with the good news, the way a shadow arrives with a lamp.

And under it, older than the sentence, is a rule she has kept her whole life without ever once looking at it in daylight. Do not get above your raising.

She could not tell you who said it to her. That is the honest part and it is the strange part. It is not a memory. There is no face attached to it, no kitchen, no year. It is simply the shape the inside of her head is, and it goes off like a smoke alarm every time something good comes near enough to be hers. A ribbon at the fair. A word from a stranger about her voice in the choir. A letter from a college with her name spelled right.

She folds the letter along the crease it came with and puts it in her apron pocket, and she will carry it there for eleven days and tell no one, and when she does tell somebody she will start the sentence with "it is nothing, but."

You are the one on the step. I am not going to guess where the rule came from and I would not be right if I did, and it is not what this is about anyhow. What it is about is smaller and stranger: a woman who is free is still taking orders from a voice she cannot source, on the subject of her own worth, and obeying it so fast that she has never had a chance to look at it. So I have come and sat down on the step beside you, and I am going to ask you to hold the good news in your hand a minute longer before you cut it down to size.

A Rule Nobody Signed

Let me name the weight first, because it has been carried without a name on it and that is what has kept it working.

It is not modesty. Modesty is a good thing and this is not it, and the tell is that modesty knows it is choosing. This chooses nothing. It fires. A good word comes in and the discount is already in your mouth before any decision gets made, and the reason it is so fast is that it has never had to argue with anybody, because it has never once been said out loud where it could be heard and looked at.

So look at it in daylight for a second. A rule about your worth, with no author, no date, no text, and no appeal, running your whole account of yourself. Now put beside it the only word on the subject that has an author.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.James 1:17

Cometh down. That is the whole hinge, and I would not have you walk past it. You have in your hands a good thing that came down, and a thing that came down is not a thing you climbed to. Take that from the written word rather than from me: James 1 puts the direction of every good gift in plain language, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing beside the sentence while you read it.

Work it through, because the arithmetic actually holds. If the good in your hands came up from you, then keeping it modest would be a fair concern, and a person could get above her raising by inflating what she made. But that is not the account Scripture gives. It comes down. From the Father of lights, in whom there is no variableness, which is to say He does not hand a thing over on Tuesday and think better of it on Thursday. You are holding something that was given from above your raising, so receiving it cannot possibly be climbing above it. That is not my ruling to give or to take back. It is written in Ephesians 2:10 that we are His workmanship, made for good works He laid out beforehand, and the Spirit who inspired that line is not somewhere else this afternoon.

The Voice You Actually Answer To

Now the second thing, and it is the one that turns the lamp on.

An order only works if the one giving it has standing. A man in a yellow vest can stop four lanes of traffic with his hand, and the same hand out of the vest stops nothing, because the vest is the standing and not the hand. So the question about the voice in your head is not whether it is loud, and not whether it is old, and not even whether it once had a use. The question is who it answers for.

Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.Luke 12:32

Good pleasure. Not reluctance, not a stretch, not a favor He would rather not have done. You were given a kingdom by a Father who was glad to do it, and that settles the standing question the voice has been answering all your life. Hear the source: it is written in Romans 8:16 that the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and His Spirit is the one carrying that witness rather than leaving you to argue it out alone in an empty yard.

I will say one more thing plainly here, and then leave it, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the voice you are living under has gone past trimming your good news and started telling you the world is better off without you in it, tell one human being today, out loud, and if you are in any danger reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Getting help is one of the ordinary things a free woman does.