The Group Chat Still Exists

It is called Accountability and it has twenty two people in it and it has been silent for two years and four months, and she has not left it, and she has not muted it, and every so often somebody posts a birthday.

She started it. That is the part.

She was twenty six and she had come to the end of herself about a thing, and she did what her generation does, which is to make it public so that it would be harder to go back on. She wrote a long message. She named the thing. She said she was finished and asked them all, by name, to hold her to it, and she meant every word and she cried while she typed it.

Twenty two people replied within an hour. Some of them said things she still has screenshots of.

She was finished for about five months, which is the longest she has ever managed, and then it came back, and this time she said nothing, and the group went from a live thing to a place where people posted birthdays.

Three years.

And here is the actual shape of her life now, which nobody would guess from the outside: she has not seen eleven of those twenty two people since. Not because anybody fell out. Because she has been managing it, quietly and constantly, for three years, the way you manage a bad knee. She does not go to things where they will be. She replies late. She has become very good at being busy.

You may be managing something like that. A set of people who were present when you said it, whose faces are now, in your head, a single face, and it is a face waiting to find out.

Somebody said it out loud first

Now let me put a sentence in front of you, and I want to point out the odd thing about it before you read it, which is that God says it without being asked.

Isaiah is speaking to a people who have been publicly, nationally humiliated, in front of everybody, in a way that could not be hidden. And into that He says something that starts with an instruction and then does something strange.

Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth.Isaiah 54:4

You are addressed directly by a God who raised this subject Himself before anybody asked Him about it. Isaiah 54:4 says the same thing four ways inside one verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has settled your standing through three years of being busy on Saturdays.

He says it four times

Count them. Thou shalt not be ashamed. Neither be thou confounded. Thou shalt not be put to shame. Thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth.

Four goes at the same idea in one verse. That is not a writer running out of words. That is somebody who knows exactly how hard this particular thing is to hear, and who says it again and again the way you speak to a person who is not taking something in.

And notice that God raises it Himself. Nobody in the chapter comes to Him and asks about the shame. He brings it up, unprompted, because He knows it is the thing sitting in the room.

You are addressed directly on this by a God who raised the subject Himself and said it four ways in one breath. Isaiah 54:4 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page about a nation and puts it in a woman's hand with a phone in it.

Now let me be precise about the mechanism, because this is where you have gone wrong and it is a small error with a large cost.

You made the thing public in order to make it harder to fail. That was a reasonable move and it is the standard advice and it works for many people. But it had a side effect you did not price in: you created twenty two witnesses, and a witness is somebody who can be called, and once there are witnesses in your head there is a court in your head, and courts are where verdicts come from.

So you built a courtroom in order to strengthen a resolution. And when the resolution went, the courtroom stayed.

You are standing in a room you constructed yourself and mistaking it for a fact about the world. That is exactly the confusion Isaiah 54 speaks into, and the Spirit of God has been the one settling your actual standing for three years while you were being busy on Saturdays.

The one who is not in that group

And here is the thing that has been obscured by all twenty two of them, which is who you actually gave your word to.

You wrote that message to your friends. You also, in the same hour, said something to God, and you know you did. And He is not in that group chat. He is not one of the twenty two. He was not a witness to your promise. He was the party to it.

That distinction is the whole of this category. Witnesses have opinions. A party has a relationship, and He is the one who has already settled it.

You gave your word to God, and God is the one who has taken you back. Scripture puts the not being ashamed in His mouth four times over, and His Spirit is the one who did the settling, and none of the twenty two were consulted because none of them had standing to be.