Let Another Praise You

She did it again on Thursday at Marion's and she heard herself do it while it was happening, which is new and is worse.

It is not bragging. She wants that understood, and she would say so if anybody ever brought it up, which nobody ever has, because it is far too small a thing to bring up.

What it is, is a kind of steering. Somebody mentions a thing, and there is a sentence available that would bring the conversation round to a place where somebody would probably say something nice, and she says it. That is all. It is one sentence, it is always true, and it is placed.

Thursday it was about the hospital run she does on Wednesdays. Marion had mentioned the buses and she said, lightly, that she does not mind the drive, and there was a pause and then Marion said what Marion always says.

She got in her own car afterward and sat there.

Because she is seventy-two, and she has been doing that since she was a young woman, and she does not know how many thousands of times, and the arithmetic on that was not a comfortable thing to sit with in a driveway.

If you have started hearing yourself do something, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to be shocked.

The proverb is not a rebuke, it is a redistribution

Here is the verse, and it is one line long, and almost everybody reads it in a sterner voice than it was written in.

Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips.Proverbs 27:2

Read what it does not say. It does not say that being praised is bad. It does not say she should not want it, it does not call the appetite vanity, and it does not tell her to stop needing anything from anybody.

It moves the job. That is the whole of it. The praise is assumed. The proverb takes it as given that a person's good work should be spoken about out loud, and simply says that the speaking is somebody else's task.

And once you see it as a redistribution rather than a prohibition, the relief in it is enormous, because what she has been doing for fifty years is a job. That is what the steering is. It is work. Finding the sentence, placing it lightly enough that it does not show, doing the small internal calculation about whether this room is a room where it will land.

Fifty years of quietly doing a job that the proverb says was never hers.

You are being relieved of something rather than corrected, and it was already somebody else's job. Proverbs 27:2 is where that sits, in a line that moves the task without ever saying the praise should not happen, and the same Spirit who put it in the collection is the one who lets a woman in a driveway hear it as kindness.

The appetite is not the sin and it is in everybody

Now let me deal with the thing underneath, because if we leave it she will simply add a new item to her list of failures and go on.

She wants to be seen. That is the whole of it, said plainly, and it is one of the most ordinary things about being a person. Everybody in that kitchen wanted it. Marion wanted it. The woman who says nothing at all in these conversations wants it possibly more than either of them.

Scripture is completely unembarrassed about this. It does not treat the desire to be known and thought well of as a defect to be exterminated. It treats it as real, and then it tells you where to take it, which is a different move entirely.

And here is the specific thing about her age that nobody says out loud. Being seventy-two means the natural sources of it have thinned. The work is behind her. The children are grown and busy and love her and do not think to say things. There are fewer rooms than there were, and the ones that are left are smaller.

So the steering is not vanity increasing. It is a woman working harder at a job because the supply got shorter, and that is not a moral decline, it is a description of getting old in a country that does not do much for people who are.

You are already seen, and you were seen through every one of the fifty years, and none of it depended on the sentence landing. He promised it, in the words about a Father who sees in secret and needs nobody to point anything out to Him (Matthew 6:6), and His Spirit does not require a woman to be told a thing by Marion in order for it to be true.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food, and at seventy-two this is not small print. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will not be one here.

And the privacy this subject teaches is about audience and never about concealment. Telling your doctor is always right. Telling your daughter is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic sense. None of that is a failure of anything, and anybody who suggests otherwise has confused a rule about who you are doing it for with a rule about hiding.

You are welcome to tell the people who look after you, and it was always allowed, and it costs you nothing at all. It is written into Matthew 6:6, where the whole weight is on a Father who sees rather than on anything being kept from anybody, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a woman who has been quiet about too much already.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.