I Have Been Ashamed Of Wanting It

Sarah wants this and has never once said so out loud, and the reason is a youth group.

She was fourteen to eighteen in a place where these things were talked about constantly, and where a certain small number of people always had something, and where having something was, in a way nobody ever admitted, the ranking system.

You could tell who was near the middle. They were the ones who got up. They were the ones somebody had a word for. There was a girl who received about four in one year and Sarah can still name her.

And Sarah, who was on the edge of that group in the way quiet fourteen-year-olds are, wanted it badly and knew exactly what wanting it looked like, and so she trained herself out of it.

Not by deciding. By flinching. Every time the desire surfaced she felt the shape of the girl who had received four, and she put it down, and after about two years the flinch was automatic.

She is twenty-nine now and in a different church and a different city and it is still automatic.

What has brought it up again is that she has been quietly doing this for about eighteen months without calling it anything. She notices true things about people and she says them, one at a time, in ordinary conversation, and they land, and she never thinks about it afterwards.

Then somebody asked her recently, kindly, whether she had ever wanted this.

And she said no. And it was a lie, and she knew it was a lie while she was saying it, and she has not been able to leave it alone since.

You may know that flinch.

Maybe you wanted it in a room where wanting it was the thing the show-offs did. Maybe you trained it out. And maybe it is still down there, exactly where you left it.

The verb, and what is standing in front of it

There is a single verse that opens the whole chapter on this, and it contains an instruction most people have never actually looked at, because the shame gets to it first.

Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy.1 Corinthians 14:1

Desire.

That is an imperative. It is not a concession, not a warning, not if you happen to want this. It is a command to want, written by Paul, to an ordinary church, at the top of the chapter.

Which means the desire you have been treating as vanity is the thing you were instructed to have. Not tolerated. Instructed.

And look at what is standing directly in front of it. Follow after charity. Love goes first in the sentence, and it goes first for exactly the reason you already know from being fourteen: this can be wanted for the wrong thing, and Paul has just spent an entire chapter on that, and the fence he builds is love and not shame.

He does not solve the problem by telling anybody to stop wanting. He solves it by putting something in front of the wanting.

And your desire is under instruction rather than under suspicion. The written word makes desire an imperative at the top of the chapter, with love in front of it and not shame, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a woman who lied about it recently and knew she was lying.

And He speaks and you can carry it plainly. The word names strengthening and comfort as the whole purpose of this, and the Spirit is the one who supplies it rather than distributing it by who is near the middle of a room.

What that room actually taught you

Now let me name what happened, because you have been carrying it as a fact about yourself and it is a fact about a room.

That youth group had a scarce good and a visible distribution. Whenever those two things exist together, in any group of human beings anywhere, a ranking forms, and everybody in it can read the ranking, and nobody ever says so out loud.

That is not a criticism of anybody in that room. The adults did not design it. The girl who received four did not design it. Fourteen-year-olds are simply extremely good at reading a distribution, and you read yours accurately.

What you concluded was reasonable and wrong. You concluded that the wanting was the problem, because the wanting was what you could see in the people who got it.

The problem was the visibility, and the ranking, and the room. Your desire was never once the thing that was going wrong in there.

And what you flinched away from was a room and not a sin. The word says the heart is deceitful above all things and yet it never once names wanting a good thing as the deceit, and the Spirit is the one who tells the difference where a fourteen-year-old could not.

And nothing about you is under review for eleven years of a flinch. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has been quietly doing this for eighteen months without letting herself have a name for it.

And nothing here puts you back in that room

Let me be plain, because part of you has already imagined standing up somewhere and the answer is no.

Nothing here asks you to get up in a meeting, or be seen, or receive anything in front of anybody, or to go anywhere near a distribution you can watch. The thing that hurt you was public and this is not.

And nothing here hands you a future to give anybody. Not what will happen to somebody, not their health, not their marriage, not a date, not an outcome, because that is not this and it never was, and the fence exists so that this stays small and survivable.

What is on offer is one true sentence to one person, quietly, which you have been doing for eighteen months anyway, and permission to admit you wanted it.

And you are permitted to want this out loud. The word gives the desire as an instruction with love standing in front of it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than the ambition you have been afraid of since you were sixteen.