Her Own Opinion

They are most of the way up when her friend stops at the fork and says, top or round.

The light is going. Not dark, just that hour on a hillside when the bracken goes the color of a fox and everything below has stopped being fields and started being one long amber shape. There is a stile on the left and a sheep track that curls off right, and either of them gets you back to the car in about the same time.

Top or round.

And she hears herself say, oh, either, you choose.

It comes out warm and easy and entirely convincing, the way it always does, and her friend picks the top, and they go, and they talk about her friend's daughter's flat all the way up. It is a good evening. She is not unhappy. She likes this woman very much and she is glad she came.

Half an hour later they are back at the car and her friend drives off, and she stays, because she wants ten more minutes, and she walks back up as far as the fork on her own.

And she stands there.

There is nobody on the hill. There is nobody to accommodate, nobody whose preference has to be worked out first, nobody who will be disappointed either way. She has ten minutes and two paths and the whole thing to herself.

And she does not know which way she wants to go.

Not in a peaceful way. She reaches in for it, in the way you reach for a word you definitely know, and there is no word there. There is something else there instead, and she can feel it running, and it is a procedure: work out what the other person would like, produce it pleasantly, move on. It is fast. It has been running so long and so smoothly that she has never once been able to catch it happening in real time, and she cannot tell it apart from having an opinion, because it comes out at exactly the same speed and in her own voice.

She was not always like this. She can remember being nineteen and impossible about a poem. She can remember the shape of having a view.

Somewhere in the middle she handed it over. She could not tell you the afternoon. It was not one afternoon.

You know that fork. Maybe yours is not on a hill. Maybe it is a menu, or a paint chart, or a room where you have just been asked what you think about something and you can feel the sentence assembling itself out of everybody else's faces before you have consulted yourself at all. Something of yours went out of your hands a long time ago. You are not going to be asked here what it was, and this page is not going to guess.

Restore is a word about getting something back

Everybody knows the line. That is the difficulty with it. Six syllables that get read over people at the worst hour of their lives, until nobody hears what the verb is actually doing.

He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.Psalm 23:3

The word under restores is a bringing back. It is what a shepherd does when one of them has gone off and is standing somewhere on a hillside in the almost dark, and he goes and gets it and brings it back, and the bringing back is his job and not the animal's achievement.

And soul there is not the ghostly part of you. It is the whole living self: what you want, what you notice, what you would say if somebody asked. Your opinion is not a luxury item bolted onto your soul. It is a piece of the soul, and a piece of it has been out on the hill for a very long time.

You are being brought back by somebody whose actual job description is going and getting what wandered. I am not stretching the psalm to make it fit you. Scripture says He restores my soul in Psalm 23:3 and puts the verb entirely on His side, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes six syllables everybody has heard a thousand times and makes them land on the one thing you handed over.

And notice what He does immediately afterward, because the two halves belong together. He leads me in paths. Paths, plural, chosen, particular. The next thing the Shepherd does after bringing back the wandered part is take it somewhere specific, which is not what you do with an animal you intend to keep standing still and agreeable in a pen.

You have been brought back in order to be led somewhere and not in order to be managed. His word puts restoring and leading in the same verse and in that order, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a promise about your Tuesday rather than a line for a funeral.

He is a God who asks people what they think

Here is the part I most want you to have, and it is a thing about His manner rather than a doctrine.

He asks questions. Constantly. Where are you. Who do you say that I am. What do you want Me to do for you, said to a man who was blind by the roadside and whose need was so obvious that asking looks almost absurd, and He asked anyway, and He waited for the answer. He does not walk into people and operate. He asks, and then He stands there, in a way that would be uncomfortable if you were not used to it, until the person in front of Him says what they actually want.

So the faculty you cannot find is the exact faculty He keeps reaching for. That is not an accident and it is not a cruelty. It is a Shepherd putting His hand out for the thing He already went and got.

You are wanted for your answer and not for your agreement. It is written that He asked a man on the road what he wanted done for him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a question asked on a first century road into a question being asked at a fork on a hill in the almost dark.

Now, two honest things, because this category is where a page can do real damage if it is careless.

The first is that I am not going to ask you how it went out of your hands, and I am not going to guess, and nothing here is going to itemize what it cost you. Some people handed something over in one clear afternoon and knew what they were doing. Far more handed it over the way this woman did, in a hundred small corrections over fifteen years, and could not point to a single one of them.

And some readers on this page did not hand anything over at all. You were pushed. You were worn down over a long enough period that agreeing became the only survivable move, or somebody stood over you until refusing stopped being available. A pushed signature is not a signature. If that is what happened to you, then you are not the one who gave it away, whatever you have been telling yourself since, and nothing in this article is asking you to take a charge that was never yours.

You are not standing here as somebody who has to account for how it went. Scripture says He restores, which never once has a condition attached about how the wandering happened, and the same Spirit who is called the Comforter is the one making sure this paragraph does not become another correction.

The second honest thing is the one this whole site says in one breath: the record stands and the verdict is changed. Those years of saying oh, either, you choose are in your life. They happened, they cost you things, and God does not pretend a life away. What is changed is the verdict on you, and what is coming back is the thing itself.