I Decided I Was a Dry Sort of Person

She can tell you the year and almost the month, which she thinks is probably not a good sign.

Ailsa was twenty-four and had come back from a week away where everybody around her had plainly had an experience, and she had had a nice time and a bad night's sleep and had come home feeling like a person who had attended something.

And on the train, somewhere in the second hour, she thought: I am just not that sort.

It was a relief. That is the thing she wants understood. It was not a defeat and she did not cry about it. It was a genuine relief, the way it is a relief to stop trying to be good at a sport you are not built for, and she got off that train lighter than she got on.

She is forty-one now.

And she has spent seventeen years being, on the whole, quite content with that verdict. She does not envy the other sort. She thinks some of them are a bit much, and she is honest enough to know that thinking so is partly a defense.

She reads. She prays. She turns up. If you asked her church about her they would say she is one of the steadiest people in it and nobody would think to worry.

The thing she noticed in January, and has not been able to unnotice, is what the verdict actually did.

It did not just describe her. It excused her from expecting anything.

Seventeen years of arriving at everything with the settled understanding that nothing is going to happen to her, because of what sort she is, and a woman who arrives expecting nothing is not being humble. She is being unavailable, and she has been unavailable since a train in her twenties.

She said it out loud in the kitchen: I filed myself.

And what came up behind that, and is the reason she is reading anything at all this morning, is a small unwelcome question. What if the flatness was never a type. What if it was just a week away when she was twenty-four, and she has spent seventeen years building a personality out of one bad night's sleep.

And you may have your own train. Yours may have been earlier or later, and you may have found the verdict a relief too, and you may have been living inside it comfortably for a long time.

The table in the psalm is laid for one person on purpose

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since that train and it was never yours.

You are not a type God feeds differently. You never were. Scripture has a table laid deliberately for one named person in the middle of a bad stretch, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your constitution, who does the feeding. Set it down here on the flags. It is heavy, and there was never anything under it but a bad night's sleep.

Now hear the line, and hear how personal it is.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.Psalm 23:5

Before me.

Not a table in general. Not provision for the sort of people who receive things easily. A table laid, on purpose, in front of one person, by somebody who knew exactly who was going to sit at it.

And look at the setting. Not on a good week. Not at a retreat. In the presence of enemies, which is the psalmist's way of saying that the circumstances were not favorable and nobody would have chosen the day.

That is a table laid for a person who was not having a nice time, by a God who did not check what sort they were first.

And it is laid for you. Right now, at forty-one, on an unremarkable morning. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who sets it, and He has never once consulted a personality.

Now let me be careful here, because a page like this could do harm and I have no intention of doing any.

Nothing on this page is a comment on how your church does anything or how often, and nothing here is telling you that the people who have experiences are getting it right and you are not. Some of them are a bit much. You were not wrong about that and it was not only a defense. Scripture does not rank people by temperament and His Spirit has never sorted anybody that way.

And nothing here says you should go looking for a feeling, or work one up, or attend something in order to have one. That is a bad road and it is the exact road that produced the train in the first place.

The point is only that a description became an exemption, and Scripture lays a table in front of a named individual on a bad day, and His Spirit is the one who has been setting it in all seventeen years you were not expecting anything.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. The relief was real and it was not cowardice.

A woman who has been trying to be a sort she is not, and failing, and going home tired, is right to stop. What went wrong is not the stopping. It is that the stopping was written up as a permanent finding about her nature, on the evidence of one week, by a twenty-four year old on a train. His Spirit has never filed you and He was on that train.