I Was the Turnaround Story

She was the one they brought people to meet.

Not unkindly. Nobody in that church ever did anything unkindly, and that is important to say at the top, because what happened to her was not done to her by anybody. It was done by being a story.

She had come out of something that people knew about, and God had done what God had done, and the change in her was visible from across a room. So when somebody's daughter went bad, or a cousin came home from somewhere, that family would be brought to her, and she would sit with them and tell it, and it worked, because it was true.

She said it to the whole room one night, on a microphone, at the end of a service: I am not going back. Not ever. You have all seen what He did.

She went back four years later.

And here is the specific shape of her hell, which is different from most people's. She did not lose a private thing. She lost a public function. She had been a proof, and proofs that fail do not simply stop being useful; they become the other kind of evidence, and she cannot walk into that building without knowing that half the room is doing arithmetic about God based on her.

That is what she cannot bear. Not her own shame. The idea that somebody's grandmother, who was brought to meet her in 2019, might now be less sure about God because of what happened to a woman she met once.

And there is one face. The pastor's wife, who found her, and drove her, and sat outside a room with her twice.

Three years since she has been in that building.

You may have been useful to somebody's faith and then stopped being useful. And that may be a heavier thing than your own failure, and you may never have told anybody that this, and not shame, is what is keeping you out.

He says it twice on purpose

Now let me put a passage in front of you and make you count.

Joel has been describing a devastation. Locusts, years eaten, a nation stripped. And then comes the restoration section, and inside it there is a sentence God repeats within two verses, which He does not do casually.

And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed. And ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the LORD your God, and none else: and my people shall never be ashamed.Joel 2:26-27

You are covered by a sentence God repeated inside two verses to people whose ruin everybody had seen. Joel 2:26 and 2:27 both end with my people shall never be ashamed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has settled that over you for three years.

My people shall never be ashamed

Twice. Same words. Two verses apart. And in between them is the reason: ye shall know that I am in the midst.

That structure is doing something. He is not saying they will be spared embarrassment; those people had been publicly ruined and everybody in the region knew it. He is saying that His presence among them settles the question of their shame regardless of what the region concluded.

And He says it twice because He is dealing with people who will need to hear it twice.

You are covered by a sentence God said twice inside two verses to a people whose ruin was public. Joel 2:26 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a promise about grain and wine and stands it at the back of a church building.

Now let me deal with the thing you are actually carrying, because it is not ordinary shame and it deserves better than an ordinary answer.

You are afraid you have damaged somebody's faith. That is a serious fear and it comes from a serious love, and I am not going to wave it away.

But look at what it assumes. It assumes those people's faith was resting on you. And if that were true, then their faith was in a rather small thing that has now gone, and the honest response would be to want that faith replaced with a better one rather than propped up by your continued good behavior.

You were never the foundation. If somebody's grandmother is less sure about God because of a woman she met once in 2019, then what she needs is not you back on your feet. What she needs is what you now have, which is a God who takes people back after they fail publicly, which is a far more useful thing to know than that people sometimes get better and stay better.

You are not the ground anybody's faith is standing on, and you were never asked to be. Scripture puts the settling of shame on His presence in the midst rather than on the record of His people, and the Spirit of God has been in that building every one of the three years.

The pastor's wife

And her, because she is the face.

She found you and drove you and sat outside a room twice. And you have spent three years being certain that what you did landed on her.

Some of it did. That is real. People who invest are affected, and pretending otherwise would insult her.

But she is not the reason you are outside, and neither is her opinion, and I want to name what is actually happening: you have made yourself responsible for the whole room's theology, and appointed her the auditor of it, and neither of those jobs was ever offered to you by anybody.

You are settled with God this morning and the room's arithmetic is not your office. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is exactly what my people shall never be ashamed means when it is said twice over a publicly ruined nation, and His Spirit is the one who did the settling.