I Was Never Allowed to Say It

You are strong and you have never said it.

Not once. Not to your husband, not to a friend, not alone in a room. You have said other things. You have said you manage. You have said you get on with it. You have said people tell me I am strong, which is a sentence built entirely so that the claim belongs to somebody else.

The reason is not modesty. The reason is that in your world, a woman who says she is strong is understood to be making a claim, and claims get checked.

So you have kept the fact and refused the sentence, for decades, and the cost of that is that a true thing about you has never once been said out loud where you could hear it.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have carried what you have carried for years and got up every time and never once mentioned the carrying. Somebody who did not care would have said it long ago.

So this page will not tell you to be more confident. That is a personality instruction and this is a permission problem.

I want to show you a verse where God does the girding, which means the strength is not your claim to make in the first place.

A claim is checked, a report is not

Consider what makes the sentence unsayable, because it is a category error and not a character trait.

A claim is a statement about yourself, offered for assessment, and it invites the room to weigh it. That is the thing being avoided, correctly, because the room has weighed you before.

But there is another kind of sentence available. A report is a statement about what happened. I carried that. I stayed up with her. I moved it on my own. Reports are not checked, because they are about events and events are already in the past.

You have a report available where you thought only a claim was, and no account of what happened has ever once been open to assessment. Psalm 18:32 says it is God that girdeth me with strength, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an account possible where a claim was forbidden.

And notice why the report has never been given either. Because you have never separated the two. So the whole area has been silent, and the silence has been read by you, over years, as evidence that there was nothing to say.

You have been reading silence as evidence, and no absence of a sentence has ever once meant there was nothing there. The written word says it is God that girdeth me with strength and maketh my way perfect, which is a report rather than a boast, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates those two in somebody who has only had one.

It is God that girdeth me

David writes a line that is all report and no claim.

It is God that girdeth me with strength, and maketh my way perfect. (Psalm 18:32, King James Version)

It is God that girdeth me. The subject of the sentence is not David. The strength is real, it is on him, and he says so out loud, and the whole sentence is about who put it there.

That is the solution to your problem and it is sitting in a psalm. You can say the true thing about yourself as long as the sentence has the right subject in it, and it does, because the subject is God.

You are able to say it with the right subject in the sentence, and no true report has ever once been the same thing as a boast. Psalm 18 puts the girding on God and the strength on the man without embarrassment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that construction available to somebody who has never had it.

And read the word girdeth. It is the word for putting a belt on somebody before they work. It is preparation for effort, done by somebody else, on purpose.

You have been prepared for what you carry, and no strength on you has ever once been self-supplied. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a supplied thing feel supplied rather than claimed, and the written word says it is God that girdeth me with strength.

Say one true thing with nothing after it

Now the part I came to say, and the last clause is the whole instruction.

Say out loud one strong thing you did this week. A report. I carried that in on my own. I sat up with her. I got through Thursday.

And then say nothing after it.

That is the hard part and it is the whole exercise. The sentence you have always added afterward, the deflection, the qualifier, the well anybody would have, is the thing that converts a report back into an apology.

You have a report that can stand on its own, and no true sentence of yours has ever once needed something added to make it acceptable. The written word puts the girding on God and leaves the report standing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a full stop possible where a qualifier has always gone.

And here is why the full stop matters more than the sentence does. A qualified report is not a report. It is a claim being withdrawn as it is made, and a person who has done that for decades has never actually heard herself say a true thing about her own strength.

You have never once heard yourself say it, and no sentence has ever once been heard while it was being withdrawn. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a sentence finish, and Psalm 18:32 is the written word underneath it, where the girding is God's and the strength is real and nothing is added afterward.