14. Please describe how your circumstances affect you on your worst day. Continue on a separate sheet if necessary.
There is a small box under it. About four lines' worth. Then, underneath the box, in smaller type, a note about providing evidence.
Deborah read that question eleven times before she wrote anything, sitting at her kitchen table with a biro she had to shake twice.
The trouble is that on her worst day she is fine. That is what she wanted to put. On her worst day she gets up and she gets Kai to school and she makes the food stretch and she puts the immersion on for forty minutes instead of the hour because forty is enough if you are quick, and she does not cry in front of anybody, and by any measure that a person would use about themselves, she is doing well.
But you cannot write that. If you write that, you get nothing.
So she had to sit at her own table and take her own life apart and lay it out in the way that would score. She had to write the sentence about the shoes. She had to write down what she actually eats on the days before payment comes, which she has never said to another living person, including her sister. She had to make it sound as bad as it genuinely is, which meant she had to stop protecting it, and it turns out she has been protecting it in her own head for two years without knowing that was what she was doing.
She finished the box and the box was not big enough and she used the separate sheet, and then she read the whole thing back.
And she felt something she was not expecting, and it was not sadness.
It was shame, and it arrived from an angle she had no defense for, because it was not shame about being poor. She has thought about that one and made her peace with it. It was shame at having written it down well. At having been good at it. At having found, quite quickly, the right register to make a stranger believe her.
She sealed the envelope and washed up and did not think about it again until three in the morning.
And here is where I stop talking about Deborah, because you have sat at a table with a form on it.
Maybe not that form. There are dozens of them, and they come from different places, and they all do the same thing: they require you to describe yourself downward, in your own handwriting, to somebody who will read it in an office and make a decision. And whatever you were before you filled it in, you were not somebody being assessed. Now you have been, and something has stuck to you that you cannot get off with an outcome letter.
The clerk was reading a form, not a person
Let me put one thing straight at the start, because everything after it depends on this and I am not going to be vague about it.
Nothing in this message is telling you not to fill in the form.
Fill it in. Claim what you are entitled to. Every single thing. Take the help, take the food, take the assessment, take the appointment, take whatever has your name on it, and take it with your head up, because it is yours and it was put there for exactly this. There is nothing more spiritual about going without. Nothing. That idea has done real harm to real people and it is not in the Book.
The form is not the enemy here. The form is a form. Somebody has to work out how to give out what there is, and this is the machinery they have got, and it is clumsy and slow and it is not personal even when it feels like the most personal thing that has ever happened to you.
The enemy is the thing that came in with it. The bit that has stayed at three in the morning.
Because here is what a means test does that nobody warns you about. It teaches you, in one sitting, that there exists a version of you which can be evaluated, and that the evaluation is done by somebody who has never met you, from a page, using criteria. And once you have been through that, some part of you starts to wonder, very quietly, whether that is what you actually are: a case with a reference number, sitting somewhere in a pile, being decided about.
So listen to how God talks about the same person.
Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you.Isaiah 43:4
That is not encouragement. Look at the grammar of it.
Because. It is a reason, not a compliment. God is explaining an action He is taking, and the reason He gives is your worth, stated as an existing fact He is working from. It is the premise, not the conclusion.
And notice there is no test in the sentence anywhere. No criteria. No band, no threshold, no evidence required, no separate sheet. It does not say because you have coped well, and it does not say because you have suffered enough, which is the other direction the same lie runs in. It says because you are precious in my eyes, and the eyes are His, and the valuing was done there.
He is not a clerk. He was not handed your page. He has never once assessed you, because assessment is what you do with something whose value you do not already know.
And say this plainly with me, because a table with a form on it can be a hard place: if there is no food in the house this week, or the letter about the flat has come, or three in the morning has started sounding darker than tired, do not carry that alone. Tell one person today, and ring a local advice line or a crisis line, and there are people whose whole job is exactly this and who will not think less of you for one second. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Reaching for real help is not small faith. It is what a person with dignity does.
Here is the turn.
You have spent an afternoon writing yourself downward, and some part of you has been standing at the far end of the table ever since, holding the bowl.
That was never where you were put.
The One who sets the table already knows what is in the bowl. He did not need the separate sheet. He was not persuaded by your handwriting and He was not waiting for evidence, and there was never a moment when your worth was open for review, because He settled it in His own eyes before anybody in an office had a reference number for you.
You are in Christ, and what that means, plainly, is that the valuing has already been done, at the top, by the only one whose assessment is final. Nobody downstream of that gets to reopen it. Not a form, not a clerk, not a letter, not a look in a queue, not the sentence you had to write about the shoes.
You were never up for assessment. You were being provided for by a system that has to ask questions, and that is all that was happening at that table, and it does not reach the place where your value lives.
So take your hands off the bowl. Somebody is carrying it to the middle.
Declare this over yourself
Say these with both hands flat on the table, out loud. The standing to speak this is not something your circumstances give or take away: it is yours in Christ, given to you, exercised in His Name, and it is spoken over the shame, never over any person who has ever handled your paperwork. Speak it, keep your hands still, and leave every decision and every letter with Him, because the outcome is His.
- Shame that came home in the envelope with me, get off this table. God says I am precious in His eyes and honored and loved, and He states it as a reason, not a verdict, and He never once asked me for evidence.
- Question fourteen, you measured my circumstances and you never touched my worth. No form has ever set my value, and in the name of Jesus I take my hands off the bowl, because the valuing was done in His eyes long before anybody in an office had my name.
- Lord, You set the table and You know what is in the dish. I am not standing at the far end by the door tonight, I am sitting where You sat me, and nothing that has to be filled in can move that seat.
Isaiah 43:4
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.