Standing on Being Liked

It lasted about eleven seconds and it was not even about her, and she has thought about it every day since.

Meeting on a Thursday, nine people, and she said something she had thought was funny and it was not funny. The room did not go hostile. Nobody was unkind. There was simply a small flat silence and then somebody moved the conversation on, and it was over, and eight of the nine people in that room have certainly not thought about it since.

She has driven home eleven times replaying it. She has gone over the wording. She has worked out three better versions of the sentence. She woke at four the following Tuesday with it running, which is when she knew that something had gone wrong in a way that is not proportionate to eleven seconds.

Because it is not really about the meeting. That is what she has slowly worked out. What happened in those eleven seconds is that a floor moved slightly, and she felt it, and she has been checking the floor ever since. Being well thought of has been the ground under her whole adult life, and nobody, including her, has ever looked directly at that.

Anybody who has driven home replaying something knows this and does not need it explained. And I want to say early, before anything else, that a person who cares what other people think is not a shallow person. She is a person who has been standing on something, and it moved, and now she can feel where it is. I have no word about what those nine people think. What I want is to talk about the ground.

The promise attached to that stone

Let me put a line down and read the promise on the end of it, because the promise is the whole point and it is aimed exactly here.

Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded.1 Peter 2:6

Confounded is an old word and it is a shame word. Some translations have it as put to shame, and that is closer to what is underneath in the Greek: to be humiliated, to be publicly found wanting, to be the person in the room the silence lands on.

So look at what Peter attaches to that stone. Not success. Not popularity. He attaches immunity from being finally shamed, which is the specific thing a woman replaying eleven seconds is actually afraid of.

You are standing on a stone whose own promise is that you are never finally put to shame. That is not a nice thing to say after a bad Thursday. It is what is written in 1 Peter 2, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and sets it under a person driving home. The room is a room. The stone is elect and precious and God laid it.

And notice who chose the stone. Elect, Peter says, and precious, and both of those are God's assessments and neither is a crowd's. A stone the builders rejected, three verses later, is the same stone. The good opinion of a room was never involved in its selection.

You have a footing that was chosen by God and evaluated by nobody else, and eleven seconds of quiet did not review it. 1 Peter 2:6 is where that is written, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old letter land in a car at half past six.

Caring what people think is not the problem

Now the part this category exists for, and it comes before everything else.

She is not shallow and I am not going to imply it. Wanting to be well thought of is not vanity. It is a social animal doing what social animals do, and more than that, it is often a person who was loved conditionally somewhere early and learned that being liked is how a person stays safe. Nobody chooses that at a desk. It gets installed.

And here is the thing worth being precise about: her sensitivity to a room is a real gift. She reads people. She notices when somebody is having a bad day before anybody else does. That is the same faculty. You cannot remove the ache without removing the gift, and I would not ask anybody to trade it.

What can change is what it holds up. Right now the room's opinion is a floor, which is why eleven seconds of silence felt like something structural, because it was.

Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?Galatians 4:16

Paul, who was extremely capable of being disliked, and who did not enjoy it. That verse has hurt in it. He is not modeling indifference. He is modeling a man who felt it fully and was not standing on it.

You were never asked to stop feeling it, only to stop standing on it, and those two have never been the same instruction. Galatians 4:16 shows a man who felt it, and it is the Spirit who separates a feeling from a foundation in a person who has confused them for thirty years.

You are held right now, on the far side of a silence that did not go your way. It is written that the one who believes on that stone is not put to shame, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true in a woman who has been checking the floor since Thursday.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the truth about the four in the mornings. Being on the elect and precious stone has never been a reason to sit alone with something that needs a real person in the room.