The Thing I Have Talked Myself Out Of

It has happened four times and it always follows the same route.

First there is the memory, which is about eleven minutes long and took place in a room she can describe exactly, four years ago, at the worst point of the worst year she has had.

She was held. That is the only word she has ever found for it, and she has looked for others, and there are not any.

Then, some weeks after each time she brings it up in her mind, the dismantling starts. And it is always in the same order, which is what makes her think it is a system rather than a series of thoughts.

You were exhausted. True. She had not slept properly in about two months.

You were in a state where people experience things. Also true, and she has read enough to know exactly what the literature says about that.

Nothing happened afterwards to confirm it. True as well. The circumstances did not change and nothing was fixed and the year continued being what it was.

And then the last one, which arrives about a week after the other three and does the actual damage.

And if it was real and you doubted it four times, what does that say about you?

That is the one that closes it down. Because at that point continuing to think about it costs something, so she stops, and puts it away, and it comes back about eleven months later and the whole thing runs again from the beginning.

So let me ask you.

How many times have you dismantled the same memory?

Peter thought it was not happening the entire time it was happening

There is a night when Peter is in prison, chained between two soldiers, with the execution scheduled for the morning.

And an angel wakes him up and the chains fall off and he is told to get dressed and follow, and he does, and they walk past the first guard and the second guard and out through an iron gate that opens by itself.

And Luke tells us, in the middle of it, what Peter thought was going on.

Peter followed him out of the prison, but he had no idea that what the angel was doing was really happening; he thought he was seeing a vision.Acts 12:9

Read it again, slowly.

He was in it. He was walking through it, physically, on his own legs, with the chains actually off. And his interpretation, at the time, in real time, was that it was not real.

Luke writes this down without any embarrassment at all. There is no note excusing Peter, no suggestion that this was a lapse. It is simply reported: the man was in the middle of the most concrete rescue in the New Testament and he thought he was imagining it.

He only worked it out later, standing in a street on his own after the angel had gone.

Hear where that puts you, four dismantlings in.

You are not a person whose doubting has disqualified a memory. Scripture has Peter walking through a real deliverance certain that it was a vision, and it reports it flatly, and the Spirit He poured out has not once made a person's real-time interpretation into the deciding factor about what happened.

And now let me speak to the last of the four, because that is the one that actually does the harm, and I want to name it precisely.

If it was real and you doubted it four times, what does that say about you?

That question is not skepticism. Look at its shape. The first three are examinations of the evidence, and they are honest, and they are the sort of thing a careful mind ought to do.

The fourth one does not examine anything. It examines you, and it does it at the exact moment you were about to reopen the file, and it makes the cost of continuing higher than the cost of stopping.

That is not a thought. That is a mechanism. And the word says Peter had no idea it was really happening, and nothing anywhere in that chapter is held against him for it.

You are allowed to have doubted it four times. Peter doubted it while it was in progress.

So you are not a person whose doubting canceled something. Acts 12 has Peter walking through a real deliverance certain that it was a vision, reported flatly and held against him nowhere, and the Spirit has never made anybody's running commentary the deciding factor.