Everybody Here Remembers What I Was

It is a small place, and in a small place nothing is ever over.

She has been walking with God for six years and she is entirely, visibly different. Anybody honest would tell you that. The change is not in dispute.

And every single person in the queue at the shop knows exactly who she was before it.

They are not cruel about it. That is the strange, hard thing about a small town, and people from cities never quite understand it: nobody is unkind, and nobody forgets. It sits in the room, entirely unmentioned, permanently present, like a piece of furniture that everybody has learned to walk around.

She feels it most when something good is happening. When there is a thing on and people are needed and names are being suggested. There is a particular half-second of silence when hers comes up, and then somebody says something perfectly warm, and then the conversation moves on.

She has decided what that silence means. She decided years ago.

Not you. Everybody here remembers.

And so she does what a person does with a decision like that. She holds back. She keeps herself two steps behind where she would naturally be. She has trained herself into a kind of permanent modesty that looks like humility from the outside and is actually a woman managing her own history in a room.

Now let me put her down and ask you.

Who in your town knows exactly who you used to be?

The first one sent was the one the town talked about

There is a woman at a well at noon, and the time of day is the whole story, because nobody fetches water at noon. You fetch it early, with everybody else, and if you are coming at noon it is because you have arranged your life around not meeting people.

Jesus talks to her for a long time. It is the longest recorded conversation He has with anybody in the Gospels, and He has it with a woman with a history, in the heat, on her own.

And she goes back into the town. That is the part I want you to look at.

She goes back into the exact town that made her come out at noon, and she says the thing to the exact people she had been avoiding, and here is what Scripture says happened.

Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in Him because of the woman's testimony, He told me everything I ever did.John 4:39

Read the reason they came, because it is not the reason anybody would have chosen. You have a history and the Holy Spirit used it as the evidence, in a square, in front of the exact people who already knew every bit of it.

Read what she actually said to them. She did not lead with a doctrine. She said: come and see a man who told me everything I ever did.

She used it. The very thing she had been hiding from is the thing she walked into the square holding.

And the town came. Not despite her history. They came because they knew her history, and because a woman with a past like that does not walk into a square at the wrong time of day and announce something unless something has actually happened to her.

Her reputation was the evidence.

Now hear where that leaves you, and hear it plainly.

You are not carrying a disqualification. Scripture says many believed because of the woman's testimony, and the Spirit He poured out has never consulted a town about who He was going to use in it.

And I want to say the difficult half of that, because you will not trust the encouraging half without it.

I am not going to tell you the silence in the room is imaginary. I do not know that, and I will not sell you a comfort I cannot stand behind. Some of it may well be real. People do remember, and some of them will never fully move.

But notice what you have done with it. You took a half-second of silence and you built a ruling out of it, and then you carried out the sentence yourself for six years, and nobody in that town has ever had to lift a finger to keep you two steps back.

You have been doing it for them.

The fire this house is named for fell in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906 on a room full of people the city had already made up its mind about. Not one of them had a clean reputation in the eyes of the people who wrote the newspapers.

The Holy Spirit fell on the room, and He did not read the local opinion first.