Forty Rules by the Second Year

Tessa got free on a Tuesday in March, and I mean genuinely free, and everybody who knew her saw it.

The thing that had her is not mine to describe and it does not matter. What matters is that it went, and she came up out of it, and for about three weeks she was the lightest person in that whole building.

Then she started making rules.

The first ones were sense. Anybody would have made them. Do not go down that particular road. Do not have that number in your phone. Do not be on your own at that time of night in that frame of mind. Those are not rules, those are stitches, and a person healing needs stitches.

But she did not stop at the stitches.

By the autumn she had a rule about the radio. By Christmas she had a rule about which shop, and then which aisle in the shop. Then a rule about a color, and then a rule about a song, and then a rule about a woman at her work who had never done a thing to her but who reminded Tessa of somebody.

By the second year there were about forty of them, and she was carrying all forty in her head at once, and she had begun to be frightened in a way she had not been frightened when she was still bound.

Sister Marva sat with her in a kitchen in the February and let her list them. All of it. Took a while.

Then she said, "Baby, can I ask you something and you not get upset with me?"

Tessa said go on.

"Which of these did God give you? And which ones did you make up to keep Him honest?"

Tessa said she did not know what that meant.

And Marva said, "It means, are these fences round a garden, or are these bars round a thing you are scared is going to escape? Because a fence is love. And bars is a woman who does not believe the door was ever really opened."

Now let me talk to you, because you did the same thing and yours might not even be about a bondage.

Something got settled between you and God. Something real. And then, quietly, over months, you began adding. Not sins to avoid. Rules. A standard you set for yourself, a thing you now require of yourself, a private list of what a person who has been given that much ought to be doing.

And nobody gave you the list. You wrote it. And it has grown, because a list you wrote yourself has no author to stop it.

The freedom was the point, not the trial period

Paul opens the fifth chapter of Galatians with a sentence that has a shape to it, and the shape matters.

It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.Galatians 5:1

It was for freedom. Read that once more. The freedom is not the means to something else. It is the purpose. He did not set you free so that you could then get organized. He set you free so that you would be free, and the freedom is the finished object and not the beginning of a probation.

Do not be subject again to a yoke. And note the word again. Paul knows exactly how this goes. The second yoke is never the same as the first one. Nobody goes back to the old thing. They build a new one, out of good materials, with sincere intentions, and it sits on the same shoulders.

So hear this over you, right now, with the list in your hand. You are free, and the freedom is not on trial, and the forty rules you are carrying were never the thing keeping you standing. I am not telling you to be careless; I am telling you what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who both set you free and keeps you free, which means the fence was never load bearing and neither is your memory of it at eleven at night.

Now let me do the thing Marva did, because you need it sorted rather than swept away.

Some of your rules are wisdom. Keep them.

Scripture is full of them. Flee. Do not go there. Make no provision. Cut it off. A person who has come out of something and stays out of the alley it lives in is not legalistic, they are sensible, and I will not have anybody use grace to talk a healing person out of their stitches.

The tell is not what the rule says. The tell is what happens inside you when you break one.

If you break a stitch and you feel exposed, that is wisdom, and you go and put it back.

If you break a rule and you feel disqualified, that is a yoke, and it has to come off, because a disqualification means you had been quietly treating that rule as part of what was holding you, and nothing of yours has ever held you.

That is the whole of it. Fences make you safe. Bars make you frightened. And a woman with forty of them cannot tell which is which any more, which is why she is more afraid at year two than she was at year zero.

You have been kept for two years by Christ and not by your list, and every day that you kept the whole forty and every day that you did not, you were kept the same amount. That is written down, and it is His Spirit who does the keeping, and He has never once handed a rescued person a maintenance contract.

There was a man five hundred years ago who kept adding rules to a life that was already severe, and every addition made him more afraid rather than less, and the day he understood that the freedom was the point and not the trial period, he began writing songs. Not because he became loose. He stayed a disciplined man to the end. But he took the bars off and left the fence.