Proof of How Much I Cared

You have started again more times than you would say out loud to anybody.

You know roughly how many. You would not give the figure if somebody asked, because the figure feels like the whole story, and the story it tells you is that there is something structurally wrong with you.

I want to look at that reading, because it is the only reading you have ever been given and there is another one available.

Here is the other one. Every single one of those beginnings required hope. Not confidence, hope, which is much more expensive. Each time, you had to decide again, against your own accumulated evidence, that it might be worth wanting something. And you did that. Repeatedly. Over decades. While tired.

A person who has stopped caring begins nothing. There is nothing to count. The count exists because the caring never stopped.

Let me put the plain thing first, since it belongs first and rarely gets said. You have not been careless with any of this. The record you are ashamed of is a record of persistence in the one form that costs the most, and you have gotten up every single time. That is not a flaw showing itself over and over. That is the same courage showing itself over and over.

So this page will not ask you to begin again, and there is no plan here and no day named anywhere in it.

I want to take your count and read it correctly, out of a verse about weakness.

The same evidence, read two ways

Look at what the count is actually evidence of, because the same set of facts supports two completely different conclusions.

Read one: she keeps failing, therefore something is wrong with her. Read two: she keeps beginning, therefore something in her has not been extinguished. Both fit the data. You have only ever been offered the first, and you have never once been told that the second one is available.

You have been handed one reading of your own history, and it has never once been the only one the evidence supports. In 2 Corinthians 12:9 Paul is told my strength is made perfect in weakness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence like that operate on a woman's own record rather than only on a doctrine.

And notice which reading requires more from you. The first one is passive. It just concludes. The second requires you to accept something about yourself that is genuinely good, and that is harder work than self-criticism has ever been.

You are being asked to receive something good about yourself, and it has never once been the easier of the two options. The written word says most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, which is a man deliberately re-reading his own weakness, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that re-reading possible in somebody who has practiced the other one for years.

My strength is made perfect

Paul asks three times for something to be removed and gets an answer that is not yes.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. (2 Corinthians 12:9, King James Version)

Made perfect in weakness. Not made perfect despite it. In it.

The weakness is not the obstacle to the strength arriving. It is the location where the strength becomes visible. That is a completely different arrangement from the one most of us are running, in which the weakness has to be dealt with first so that the strength has somewhere clean to land.

You are the location rather than the obstacle, and no weakness of yours has ever once been what God was waiting on. Second Corinthians 12 puts the perfecting inside the infirmity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that stop being a paradox on a page and start being a Tuesday.

And read what Paul does with it. He glories in it. Not resigns himself to it. He reclassifies the thing he begged to have removed as the very place where power shows up.

You have a record that can be reclassified, and no history of yours has ever once been fixed in its meaning. The Spirit of God is the one who reclassifies without pretending, and the written word says most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, said by a man who had asked three times for the opposite.

Thank God for one of them

Now the part I came to say, and it is going to sound strange until you try it.

Pick one of those beginnings. Not the most recent one and not the most humiliating one. Any of them. The one in your thirties, the one after that hard winter, the one nobody was ever told about.

And thank God for it. Not for how it ended. For the fact that you began it.

You have something to be thankful for inside a beginning that went nowhere, and no ending has ever once erased what was in the starting. The written word has Paul glory in the very thing he wanted removed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can make gratitude possible about something a person has only ever been ashamed of.

And here is why that one act does more than a year of trying to feel better about yourself. Shame cannot survive gratitude aimed at the same object. It has to leave, because the two cannot occupy the same fact at the same time.

You are able to thank God for the very thing you have been ashamed of, and shame has never once been able to hold ground that gratitude has taken. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that exchange happen in an ordinary room, and 2 Corinthians 12:9 is the written word underneath it, where the weakness is where the strength is perfected and the man is glad about it.