The Word I Took Off My Profile

It took Hannah about forty seconds, and she has thought about it every day for five months.

Eleven at night, on the sofa, phone in one hand. She was tidying up the little line of text that sits under her name on the thing she uses for work. Job title, city, the usual. And there was one more word on the end of it, and she had put it there herself four years ago, on a morning when she had felt braver than she had ever felt.

She looked at it for a while.

Then she pressed the cursor at the end of it and held down the backspace key and watched it go letter by letter, and typed something warmer and vaguer in its place, and pressed save, and put the phone face down on the arm of the sofa.

And something went quiet in the room.

Not dramatic. Nobody said anything. Nothing happened, in the way that nothing happens when you close a door softly in a house where everyone is asleep. But she sat there in the dark with the television off and she knew perfectly well what she had just done, and she could not have told you why she had done it, which was the part that kept her awake.

She was not afraid of anybody in particular. There had been no incident. Nobody had said a word to her.

It was more that she had been watching the weather around that word for about two years. Watching it get used as shorthand for things she does not think. Watching it appear in sentences next to other words she would not choose. Watching people she likes flinch very slightly when it comes up, and then be lovely about it, which is somehow worse.

And so, slowly, without any decision, she had begun to feel like a person standing next to a word rather than a person who has one. And at eleven at night, on a sofa, she had made it official in forty seconds.

The word is still true. That is what she keeps coming back to. Nothing about the word became untrue between four years ago and that Tuesday. What changed was the room the word walks into.

But the thing that will not leave her alone is smaller and more personal than any of that.

She misses saying it.

And you know this. Maybe you never typed it anywhere. But there is a word that is exactly true about you, and you have been leaving it out of your own description, and every time you leave it out you feel a small subtraction that nobody else can see.

The word belongs to the runner, not to the crowd he runs into

Before anything else, take this off, because you have been carrying it and it was never assigned to you.

You are not the manager of the reputation of a word. You never were. Scripture gives you a word about what has happened and it never once appoints you the custodian of everybody's associations with it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a word land in a person, never the atmosphere around it. Put that down. It has been on you for two years and it is not your load.

Now, where the word comes from.

It comes from a runner.

There is a picture in the prophets, and it is deliberately physical. A city is under siege and has been for a long time, and the people on the walls have been watching the horizon for weeks, and then one morning there is a figure coming over the ridge at a run. He is a long way off. Nobody can hear him yet. And the watchmen start shouting before they know a single detail, because a man does not run like that with bad news.

How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation.Isaiah 52:7

Feet. Not a platform. Not a position. Feet on a hillside, still a mile out.

That is the origin of the word, and it tells you what the word is for. It is a word about a message being carried from where the thing happened to where the people are waiting. It is entirely about the message and not at all about the runner's opinions, his tribe, or what anybody on the wall thinks of him personally.

And that message is on you. You are carrying it right now, in your ordinary week, with your ordinary shoes on, and it is not something you have to qualify for. That is written, and His Spirit is the one who put the message in your hands, and He did not attach conditions to the handover.

Here is the part that I think will actually loosen something.

The runner does not defend the news. He cannot. He was not there when the battle turned. He has no way of proving one word of it standing in the road, and it would be an odd thing for him to try, because he is not the source of it. He is the one carrying it. All he does is arrive and say the thing.

You have been trying to be the source. That is why it has gotten so heavy. You have been standing at the gate arguing for a battle you did not fight, defending a victory you had no hand in, as though the truth of it depended on how well you held your ground in a comment or a coffee break. Scripture never once put the battle on the runner, and His Spirit is the one who carries a message into a person.

It never did. It rested entirely on what happened on the field.

You are carrying good news and it is good whether or not the wall cheers. Scripture calls those feet beautiful before the city has responded to a single word, and the same Spirit who raised Christ is the one who keeps the message alive in you when nobody at all is watching. The beauty is in what is being carried. It was never a rating from the wall.

And I will say the honest thing about that line under your name, because you already know it. The warmer, vaguer word you typed instead is not braver and it is not kinder. It is quieter. It has never once described you and it never will, and you have felt the subtraction every day since, which is exactly why you are still thinking about a Tuesday in the spring.