The Rota on the Noticeboard

The rota goes up on the second Sunday of the month, on the board by the hall door, three sheets in laminate pouches.

Bridget knows the layout of it the way you know a face. Readings on the left. Refreshments in the middle. Setting up and locking up on the right, in the smaller font, because those are the jobs that never get thanked and everybody knows it.

Her name was on all three for eleven years.

It has not been on any of them for fourteen months, and nobody has ever said one word to her about that.

The trouble itself was quick and it was public in the way things are public in a place that size. A complaint went in about something she was supposed to have said to a boy at the youth club. It was looked into properly, by people with a folder and a procedure, and it was found to be nothing, and she has the letter that says so and the meeting where it was said out loud in front of six people.

Everyone was very good about it. That is the honest truth and she would say the same. Nobody was cold to her. Two women were extraordinarily kind.

And the invitations simply stopped.

Not with a bang. The Wednesday group carried on and she was not told it had moved to a different house. The carol service reading went to somebody else, which is completely fine, and it went to somebody else the next year as well. The fete had a new person on the cakes and Bridget found out from the newsletter. Nobody ever decided anything, as far as she can tell. It is more that a shape closed over the place where she used to be, the way water does.

So she has spent fourteen months doing the thing.

You know the thing. She has gone back over an email she sent in March and reread her own sentence about the parking, wondering how it sounded. She has thought about a joke she made at the barbecue that nobody laughed at properly. She has wondered whether it was the way she said no to the flower rota that time, or whether she came across as chilly at the school gate the week it all started, or whether people are being careful around her out of kindness and she is supposed to be the one who breaks it.

Fourteen months of a woman being her own inquiry, long after the real one closed.

And I want to say the thing she has never said, because I think it is the thing you have never said either.

Underneath all of it is a quieter idea, and it is that there must be something in her. Something the folder did not catch. Something everyone else can see from where they are standing and she cannot see from in here.

Something that makes her not quite safe to ask.

What it is not

I am not going to tell you what the silence was for.

I do not know. I was not there, I have not read the folder, and the people who might know are not saying. And more than that, I will not do the thing that gets done to people in your position, where somebody arrives with a warm voice and explains your loss back to you as a pruning, or a refining, or a season God engineered to teach you something. I have no business doing that and neither has anyone else.

So here is the other thing, which is smaller and much stronger. I can tell you what it is not.

Psalm 103:10 says He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. Read it slowly, because it is not a softening. It does not say He deals with us gently according to our sins. It says He does not deal with us according to them at all, and the Holy Spirit is pressing that into a woman who has spent fourteen months looking for the offense that would explain a noticeboard.

There is no bill outstanding. That is what that verse is.

You have not been quietly repaid for something. You are not standing in the consequence of an offense nobody has told you about, and God is not the author of the silence around your name. Nothing written in Psalm 103 leaves room for a second, unspoken account, and the Spirit has never once come to a cleared woman to open one.

Look at the measure the psalm reaches for two verses later, because David could have said anything and he said this. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our rebellions from us. North and south have a meeting point. East and west do not. Whichever way you go you never arrive at the other one, and that is the distance chosen, deliberately, to describe what God has done with everything He could have held against you.

And I have no standing to tell you to stop the audit. Fourteen months of it is not a stupidity, it is a mind trying to make a shape out of silence, which is what minds do.

But Psalm 103:10 has that standing and His Spirit is the one making it land: you are not under investigation. Not by Him. There is no folder in heaven with your name on the spine and one page still open at the back.

Now here is a hard thing said gently. The people who make that rota are not your enemies.

Some of them were frightened. Some of them did not know what to say and so said nothing, which is a small cowardice and an extremely common one, and some of them genuinely believe they are being kind by not putting you in a position. Bless them. Not because they earned it and not because you have to feel warm about it, but because a heart that has to keep an enemy in order to stand up has taken on a second job it was never given, and the Spirit is not asking you to carry that on top of everything else.

He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.Psalm 103:10