She Went To Somebody I Know

She has gone to somebody you know by name, and now there are two people in your head instead of one.

That is the particular cruelty of this one. A stranger would have been survivable. You would have been sad for a week and moved on. But it is her, and you know what her place looks like, and you have an opinion about her work, and you have now spent four days holding the two of you up against each other like two photographs.

And you have done the comparison in both directions, which is the exhausting part. Half the time you have decided she must be better at something. The other half you have decided she is not, which is worse, because then you cannot explain it at all.

Nobody did anything wrong here. She did not take anything. Your customer made a choice, and the two people in your head are both doing their work and neither of them is thinking about you.

I am not going to tell you how to get her back and I am not going to say anything about the other woman, because that would be a grievance and this is not that kind of place. I am going to talk about a verse that names exactly this.

It was not a stranger

There is a moment in the psalms where David says something very precise about who hurt him, and the precision is the point.

He has been let down, and he goes out of his way to say that an enemy would have been easier.

But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. (Psalm 55:13, King James Version)

You are feeling the nearness of it, and that nearness has never once been a weakness in you. Psalm 55:13 names the closeness as the thing that makes it hurt rather than the size of the loss, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a hall with coats over arms and a familiar face across the room.

Look at how carefully that is said. Not an enemy. Not a stranger. A man mine equal, which means somebody at the same level, doing the same kind of thing.

Scripture puts it in the record that this variety of hurt is its own variety. Nobody is told to be bigger about it. It is simply named accurately, which is more than most people manage.

You have an ache that is already named in Scripture, and it has never once needed to be explained away. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a psalmist's precise sentence reach a woman standing at the edge of a crowded room, and Psalm 55:13 says the word equal and lets it stand.

Two people in your head

Let me say what the comparison is doing, because it is not self improvement.

You are trying to find out where you stand, and there is no way to find that out, because the question does not have an answer. Every round of it ends in either she is better than me or it makes no sense, and both of those keep the two of you side by side in your head for another hour.

You were not being measured against her, and there has never once been a scale with the two of you on it. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a comparison out of a woman's hands, and the written word names an equal and an acquaintance in Psalm 55:13 without putting either of them above the other.

And here is the cost, and it is not the feelings. It is the hours. Four days, and you have made nothing, planned nothing, finished nothing, because all of your attention has been in a hall comparing two women who both have work to do.

She is doing her work. You have been doing arithmetic about her.

You are not behind anybody, and you never were. His Spirit is the one who puts a woman back into her own week without making her cold about anybody, and Psalm 55:13 names the closeness of the hurt and says nothing at all about who was better.

Let both of them go

So here is the exercise, and it involves two people rather than one.

Let them both go out of your head. The customer and the other woman. Not forever, and not as a decision about how you feel. For one morning.

You are able to set two people down for a morning, and setting them down has never once meant you were pretending. Psalm 55:13 names the ache without asking anybody to get over it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes one quiet morning possible for a woman who has carried two faces for four days.

Then do the next piece of work, and do it well. Properly. The way you do it when nobody has left.

You will find one of them wandering back in about twenty minutes. Put her down again. It will be about four times in the first hour and then less.

You were never required to resolve it before you could work, and you are not required to now. The Spirit of God carries a woman past the need to know where she stands, and the written word names the hurt of an equal in Psalm 55:13 and leaves the accounting to God.