I Poured Out My Soul

The first person to say it said it kindly, which is why it stuck.

They were in a parking lot after a prayer meeting and it was raining slightly and the woman put a hand on her arm and said, with real warmth, that she might want to be careful not to get too intense about things. That God is not far away. That she does not have to work so hard.

She was twenty-six. She thought about it for a week.

The second person said it less kindly, four years later, and the third said it as a joke in front of other people, and the fourth was her own husband, who is a good man and was worried about her and did not know how else to say it.

So now she edits. That is the thing she has never told anybody. When she prays she takes it down about forty percent, automatically, the way you lower your voice in a building without deciding to. She brings God a version. And it works, in the sense that nobody comments any more.

And the ache is still in her at the full size it always was, and it goes back in the drawer at the end, and she has begun to wonder whether God finds her too much as well and is simply too polite to say.

If somebody has said that to you, come and sit down. There is nothing to turn down in here.

A priest looked at a praying woman and got her completely wrong

There is a scene early in Samuel that I want you to sit inside for a minute, because it is one of the few places in the Bible where somebody's praying is publicly misread and the text takes her side.

A woman is at the temple. She is carrying something that has been in her for years, and it has got so far past words that her lips are moving and no sound is coming out, and the priest in charge of the building watches her from his seat and concludes that she is drunk.

Her own priest. In the one place she had gone to be with God.

And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD.1 Samuel 1:15

I have poured out my soul before the LORD. That is the phrase, and it is her own. She names what she was doing while she is being accused of something else, and she names it without one word of apology in the sentence.

And she was not too much. She was exactly the right amount for what was actually in her, and the man who thought otherwise was mistaken, and Scripture records his mistake and not hers.

You are not too much, and you were not too much in a parking lot in the rain at twenty-six. 1 Samuel 1:15 is where that sits, in a woman's own account of herself given straight back to a man who had misjudged her, and the same Spirit who kept that exchange in the record is the one who lets it land in somebody who has been editing since.

What the people who said it were actually doing

Now let me be fair to them, because this matters and because bitterness is not what we are after here.

Most people who say you are too intense are not making a judgment about your prayer life. They are describing their own discomfort and putting it in the second person, which everybody does and nobody notices doing. Watching somebody feel a thing at full size in front of you is genuinely uncomfortable when you have got the same thing in you and it is folded up small.

Your husband was frightened. The woman in the parking lot had a theology about not striving and she reached for it because she cared. The one who made the joke was managing a room.

None of them were reading you. All of them were reading themselves, out loud, in your direction. And a woman who has been reading herself off those four sentences for a decade has been using instruments that were never pointed at her.

You have been measured with somebody else's discomfort, and you were never actually assessed at all. That is Psalm 139:1 and 2, not my defense of you, and His Spirit is what makes the difference between being watched and being known settle in a person who has confused the two.

The paragraph that outranks all of it

Before another line, this outranks everything above.

Some people must not go without food. 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 first 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.

And this next part is not optional either. Nothing on this page treats going without food as a way of proving how much you mean it. Intensity is not measured in what your body gives up, and nothing here would ever suggest that it should be.

Privacy, too, is about audience and never about hiding. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is plain good sense. None of that fails anything.

You have been welcome exactly as you come, and you were welcome before anybody in a parking lot had an opinion. It is written into the invitation to come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16), and the Holy Spirit carries it into a woman who has been coming in a reduced version for years.

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.