I Cannot Forgive Myself For Signing

You can describe the carpet.

That is how many times you have been back. You know the carpet, the temperature of the room, which way the window faced, what the chair did when you moved it.

You have been in that room several thousand times since, and every visit runs the same way, and none of them has ever produced anything.

You go in, you watch yourself pick up the pen, and you try to get the woman in the chair to stop.

She never does. She cannot. She is two years and four months behind you and she has no idea.

And then you come out and it is a Tuesday and you have lost twenty minutes.

Here is the thing about this that other people do not understand.

You are not angry at anybody. Nobody misled you. You have never once said that anybody did.

The whole weight of it is aimed inward, at one woman on one afternoon, and there is no version of forgiving her available because she keeps doing it. Every time you go back in, she signs it again.

That is the loop, and you know it is a loop, and knowing has not been enough to stop it.

There is a verse about the past that is almost rude in how directly it deals with this.

Remember ye not the former things

God says something in Isaiah that sounds impossible until you look at the word He uses.

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. (Isaiah 43:18, King James Version)

Consider. That is the second half and it is the operative one.

He is not asking a person to develop amnesia. A memory is not a thing anybody can delete on command and He knows that better than anybody.

Consider means to go over. To turn a thing around and inspect it. To visit.

You have been told to stop visiting rather than to stop remembering, and Isaiah 43:18 says neither consider rather than neither recall. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that distinction usable, and He has been waiting to make it since about the fourth visit.

That changes the instruction from impossible to merely difficult.

Nobody is asking for the afternoon to be forgotten. The carpet will always be describable. That is allowed.

You are being asked to stop going in.

You are able to obey this exactly as written, and Scripture puts the command on the considering rather than on the memory. The Spirit of God is the one who does the holding when a person stops going back, and it is written in Isaiah 43 what He does with the room instead.

And the verse after it is the reason the command is given, and it is not a scolding.

Behold, I will do a new thing. He is not telling anybody to stop looking back because looking back is naughty. He is telling them to stop because their eyes are pointed the wrong way to see what He is doing.

You have been facing the wrong direction rather than committing an offense, and the written word gives the reason as something new rather than as a rebuke. The Holy Spirit is the one doing the new thing, and Isaiah 43:18 is the turn of the head that lets a person see it.

He has never once asked

Now the part that will actually reach you, and it is about a question nobody has asked.

In two years and four months, God has not asked you how you got here.

Not once. There has been no accounting demanded. There has been no moment in prayer where the subject was raised and an explanation of the afternoon was required.

You have been raising it. Every time. You go in, you present the case, you prosecute the woman in the chair, and then you come out having been the only participant in the whole proceeding.

You have been holding a trial that God never convened, and it is written that the former things are not even to be considered. The Spirit of God is the one who has been present at every one of those sessions without ever taking part, and Isaiah 43 says why.

And there is one thing about the woman in the chair that is worth saying plainly.

She did the best available thinking with the information she had on that afternoon. She did not have the last two years. Nobody in any chair anywhere has ever had the next two years.

Prosecuting a person for not having information she could not have had is not justice. It is not even a real charge.

You are not guilty of failing to see the future, and the written word never once made foresight the standard for a person. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an impossible charge off somebody, and He does not need her to argue it first.

And one plain thing, because this is the heaviest row on this site. If those visits have started taking your nights somewhere dark, and thoughts about not being here have begun to arrive, that is not something to carry alone. Call or text 988, the crisis line, tonight, and tell one real person: a doctor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you. And for the paperwork itself, take it to somebody qualified to read it.

You have never been meant to be the only one who knows how heavy this has got, and Scripture tells a person to stop considering the old thing rather than to carry it silently. The Spirit of God is the one who goes with a woman into that call, and Isaiah 43:18 is why she does not go back into the room first.

Say it, then walk out of the room

So here is the thing to do, and it is physical, and that is not an accident.

Say out loud: I am not going back into that room.

Then walk out of whichever room you are standing in. Actually walk. Out of the kitchen, into the hall, and stand there for a second.

You are obeying a command about considering rather than trying to feel differently, and Isaiah 43:18 says neither consider the things of old. The Spirit of God is the one who meets a person in the hall, and He is not measuring how convincing it sounded.

The reason it has to be physical is that the visits are not thoughts. They are more like habits, and a habit is interrupted by a body rather than by an intention.

Walking out of a room while saying it gives your mind a matching action, and that is what makes it stick when three years of deciding not to think about it has not.

You have been trying to think your way out of a habit, and the written word hands a person a turn of the head toward something new. The Holy Spirit is the one who does the new thing that Isaiah 43 promises right after that command.

Then go and open in the morning, and the obligation is exactly what it was, and you are not carrying the afternoon on top of it.