Come Down From The Bench

 God has already closed the case against you. Not softened it. Not suspended it. Not agreed to review it if your behaviour improves over the next twelve months. Closed it. Finished. The file is not sitting on a shelf somewhere waiting to be reopened when you fail again. And yet there you are, still sitting on the bench. Still hearing evidence. Still calling witnesses from twenty years ago. Still delivering a verdict, every morning, against yourself.

This is the strangest courtroom in the world. You are the judge, and you are the accused. You are the prosecution, and you are the one in the dock with no defence. You have appointed yourself to a position God has abolished, and you have been sitting there so long that coming down feels like disobedience. It is not disobedience. It is obedience. The bench is not yours.

Three Names for the Same Weight

This book deals with three things that walk together and often arrive in the same woman at the same time. Self-condemnation is the voice that does not merely tell you that you did something wrong. It tells you that you are wrong. It does not point at an action. It points at a person, and the person is you. Self-pity is what happens when you stop looking at the Word and start staring at the report. It is not the same as grief, and we will draw that line carefully, because grief is holy and self-pity is a trap dressed as grief.

Regret is the endless rehearsal of a decision you cannot go back and change. Should have left. Should have stayed. Should have spoken. Should have seen it sooner. Three names. One weight. And every one of them keeps you looking backwards at a case God has already stamped and filed.

What This Book Will Not Tell You

There is a message everywhere at the moment, and parts of it are kind and true. It says that the voice inside you was learned, not born. It says no baby ever came into the world despising itself. It says you are not to blame, and you do not have to punish yourself. All of that is worth hearing. But it finishes in a place this book cannot follow it to. It finishes by telling you that you are enough.

You are not enough. Neither am I. That is not an insult; it is a relief. If your freedom depended on you being enough, you would spend the rest of your life trying to reach a standard that moves every time you approach it. And on the day you fail, the whole structure would fall in on you again. Scripture does not tell you to look harder at yourself until you feel better about what you see. It tells you to stop looking at yourself and look at Christ. He is enough. And because He is, the case is closed regardless of what your feelings report this morning.

Who This Book Is For

It is for the woman who stayed too long and cannot forgive herself for staying.

It is for the mother who sees something in her grown children and knows where it came from, and weeps.

It is for the woman whose children have not spoken to her in years.

It is for the woman carrying blame for a body that was never the problem.

It is for the woman who has been told for so long that she is the  difficulty, that she now says it to herself before anyone else can.

It is for anyone — woman or man — who has been beating themselves up over years they cannot get back.

And it is written by someone who has sat where you are sitting. I have wept over my children. I have gone over my own decisions until there was nothing left to go over. I have had to build myself up in my most holy faith, praying in tongues for hours, simply to be able to stand my ground. I am not writing to you from a safe distance.