The Course I Never Finished

There is a folder in her email called Receipts and she has never once opened it on purpose.

The course had eight modules and she stopped in the middle of the fourth one. She remembers the exact moment. The man was drawing a diagram, and it was about how a particular verse works if you understand it properly, and she was sitting on her bed with a highlighter in her hand and her laptop on a pillow, and something in her chest just went flat.

Not angry. Flat. She closed the laptop and did not open it again.

That was fourteen months ago. The card it went on has a balance and the balance has her attention on the second of every month.

And the emails still come. A cheerful one every few weeks about finishing what she started and stepping into what is waiting, and she deletes them without reading them, and she has got very quick at it now, and the quickness is its own kind of tell.

She has told nobody. Not the friend who tells her everything. Not her sister, who would be lovely about it and whose loveliness would be unbearable. Not the woman at church who prays with her about actual things.

She is twenty seven and she is paying, in silence, for a decision she made at nine o'clock on a Tuesday evening when she was tired and wanted something to change.

You know that folder. Yours might be a coaching package, or a set of masterclasses, or a weekend that cost you three months of putting a bit aside. And it is not the money that keeps it silent. It is that saying it out loud would require you to be a person who bought that.

Come and sit on the floor. Mugs are on the desk. I want to say something to you and it is not the thing you are braced for.

There is no code, and there was never anything wrong with the hunger

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I will not add one more of those to your life.

There is no code. There was nothing in module five, and there was nothing in module eight, and if you had finished the whole thing you would have arrived at the end with the same flat feeling and a certificate.

And now the part that matters more, and I want to be very clear about it. I am not going to spend this article being angry at whoever made that course. I do not know them, I do not know what they believe, and your relief is not going to be built on somebody else being torn down, because relief built that way needs a new villain every year and never actually rests.

Here is what God says, and notice the tone of it, because everybody reads it as a rebuke and it is not.

Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.Isaiah 55:2

Read the question again. It is a question. He is asking, and He is asking somebody He has just invited to come and eat and drink without money and without price, two verses earlier.

He is not saying: how stupid of you. He is saying: why are you paying for that, when what you are hungry for is here and is free.

That is a completely different sentence from the one you have been saying to yourself since module four.

You were not foolish, and nothing in that verse is God laughing at somebody who was hungry. That is not a soft reading arranged for a hard fourteen months. It is the plain sense of Isaiah 55, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a question asked in enormous tenderness and lays it on a woman sitting on a bedroom floor.

You have the thing you were actually hungry for, and it has never had a price on it. Scripture says come, buy wine and milk without money and without price, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ancient invitation into something a person can accept on a Tuesday.

Now let me name the real thing, because the balance on the card is the least of it.

You did not buy a course. You bought a hope that something could change, at nine o'clock on an evening when you were tired, and the reason you cannot say it out loud is that it would mean admitting how much you wanted something to change.

That is what is under the silence. Not embarrassment about money. Exposure. Telling your sister would mean telling her that you were not fine, and you have spent a long time being the one who is fine.

You are not exposed by having wanted something, and hunger has never once been the shameful part of anybody's story. Scripture says blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled, which is God putting hunger in the blessed column, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the word blessed and puts it exactly where the shame has been sitting.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because fourteen months of a folder does not close because somebody was kind about it. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what deleting emails never does. So speak, out loud, in your own room. You have the standing to tell a shame in your own house what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by good decisions, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a bedroom.