I Am Fourteen Again In That Room

You are a grown woman and you have a life, and none of it comes into that room with you.

It happens somewhere between the door and the second sentence. Somebody says something entirely ordinary, in a particular tone, and there is a small drop, and by the time you have your coat off you are fourteen.

Not metaphorically. It is a physical thing. Your voice goes slightly different. You start explaining yourself about small matters that need no explanation. You laugh at the moment you would have laughed at fourteen, in the same way, at the same kind of thing.

And you can watch yourself do it, which is the humiliating part. You know exactly what is happening and you cannot stop it, and driving home you will run the whole afternoon back and be furious at a woman who did not manage to be herself for four hours.

Let me say something about that before we go on, because I think you have been carrying it as a personal failure for a long time.

This is not weakness. A room where a person spent their formative years is not a neutral place. It is full of cues, and cues do their work in about half a second, well underneath anything you decide. Everybody has a room like that, and the people who claim otherwise usually just live further away from theirs.

Then the LORD will take me up

There is a line in the psalms that reaches further into this than most people notice.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up. (Psalm 27:10, King James Version)

Take me up. It is a picking up word. It is what is done with a child who has been left somewhere: somebody comes, and lifts, and carries.

And notice the condition attached. When, not if. The psalm allows for the possibility that the people who were meant to hold a person did not, and it does not spend a line arguing about it or asking whether they meant to.

I want to be careful, because you may not be talking about anything so severe. Most people in that room are not monsters, and forsake may be far too large a word for what happened in your family, which might have been nothing more than nobody ever quite seeing you. But the mechanism is the same, and so is the answer.

You are held by somebody who was never part of the arrangement in that room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the taking up in that hallway. Scripture puts that outside the family entirely, and it is written into Psalm 27:10 that the lifting belongs to the LORD rather than to anybody in the house.

And it is present tense in effect, not a promise about later.

You have somebody in that hallway who was not in the original room, and Psalm 27:10 makes the taking up His job and not yours. The Spirit of God is with you between the door and the second sentence, and the written word puts a picking up word where a child was left.

Why the room wins

Let me explain what is actually happening, because I think this has been called a failure of nerve for years.

This is not remembering being fourteen. It is being cued back into a version of yourself that room built. The furniture, the smell, the exact pitch of somebody's voice on a particular kind of remark: those are not memories, they are triggers, and they run underneath thought.

And that version of you was not stupid or weak. She was competent at the job she had, which was surviving a specific room, and she developed the exact behaviors that worked in there. The explaining. The laughing early. The slightly higher voice. Those were adaptive once, and the room still calls for them because the room has not been told anything has changed.

You were competent at fourteen and you are competent now, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference between a memory and a reflex. The written word puts a God who lifts rather than one who assesses, and Scripture never once treats a person's history as a weakness in them.

And here is what does not work, and you have tried all of it. Resolving to be different does not work, because a decision made in a car at seventy miles an hour is no match for a cue that fires in half a second. Rehearsing conversations does not work, because the room will not use your script. Deciding to be less bothered does not work, because you cannot instruct a feeling.

What does work is something small and physical and slightly odd, and I want to give it to you.

You have never once been left there to manage it alone, and the written word puts the lifting entirely on His side of it. The Spirit of God is present in the four hours where a woman is not managing to be herself, and Psalm 27:10 attaches no conditions at all to the taking up.

One adult fact, carried in

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately concrete.

Decide one true adult fact about your life, and say it to yourself in the car before you go in.

Not an affirmation. Not something about your worth. A fact. Something specific, current, and verifiable, that a fourteen year old could not possibly have said.

I run a department of nine people. I have kept a household going through two years that would have finished most people. I have a friend who rings me when something goes wrong, because I am the person she rings. Say it out loud, in the car, before the door.

You are able to carry one fact in with you, and it has never once required anybody in that room to acknowledge it. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman saying a plain sentence in a parked car, and it is written into Psalm 27:10 that the lifting is done by somebody outside that house entirely.

And here is why a fact rather than a feeling. A feeling gets overwritten in the hallway; that is exactly the problem. A fact does not get overwritten, because it is not in the room's jurisdiction. It happened somewhere else. It is still true at four in the afternoon in that kitchen, whatever your voice is doing.

It will not stop you being fourteen. I want to be honest about that. What it does is give you something to put your hand on when you notice it happening.

You are held by somebody who is not affected by the furniture, and Psalm 27:10 says take me up rather than help me cope. The Spirit of God stays the same age in that room while everything else in you shifts, and the written word puts the taking up where nobody present can reach it.