I Made One Person Responsible for Telling Me I Was Alright

There was a man who came to every show I did for about four years, and I could find him in a dark room in under two seconds.

He was not a critic. He was not anybody important. He booked a small room and he liked me, and somewhere in there I handed him a job he never applied for, which was to tell me, with his face, whether that night had been alright.

I did not know I had done it. Here is how I found out.

He got sick one winter and missed a run of nights, and I did three shows that went well by every measure I had, and I came off each of them feeling like nothing had happened. Not disappointed. Blank. The way a scale feels when it has nothing on it.

I remember standing in a hallway after the third one, holding a bottle of water, and thinking a sentence I had never thought before: I do not know if that was good. Two hundred people had told me. I did not know.

That is the day I found out that I was not asking the room. I was asking one man, and I had been asking one man for years, and the room had been a formality the whole time.

The verse everybody hears as an insult

Here it is, and it lands hard the first time.

Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh. (Jeremiah 17:5-6, King James Version)

Read the second half before you decide what the first half means. He shall not see when good cometh. That is not a punishment being handed down. That is a description of a plant in a place with no water, and what happens to it when rain arrives somewhere it cannot reach.

Which is exactly what happened to me in that hallway. Good had come. Three rooms of it. I could not see it, because the only instrument I had for detecting good was standing in a bedroom with a chest infection.

You are not being scolded here, and Scripture is not describing your character. Jeremiah 17 describes a plant that cannot see rain rather than a man who deserves less of it. It is the same Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit, who reports on a person from somewhere weather cannot reach.

The verse right after it is the one nobody quotes

Jeremiah does not leave a person in the desert. Read the next three verses, because they are the same picture with the water moved.

Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green. (Jeremiah 17:7-8)

Same tree. Same climate. The heat still comes: the passage says so plainly and does not pretend otherwise.

What has changed is where the roots are. This tree is not spared the summer. It is fed from something the summer does not control.

That is the whole difference between a person whose verdict comes from one face and a person whose verdict comes from somewhere else. Both of them get the hard season. Only one of them goes brown in it.

You have roots available that are not attached to anybody's opinion of you. Jeremiah 17:8 puts the tree by the river and lets the heat come anyway, and it is the Spirit of God, Ephesians 3:16 named as the one strengthening the inner man, who does the feeding that a face cannot do.

Paul names the same trap in one line

Paul, who had more critics than anybody in the New Testament, puts it as a question he asks himself out loud.

For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. (Galatians 1:10)

Notice he does not say pleasing people is wicked. He says it is a job, and that a man cannot hold two jobs at once. It is the same arithmetic Jesus uses about masters, applied to approval instead of money.

And Proverbs says the cost in one short line that has never needed a commentary:

The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe. (Proverbs 29:25)

A snare. Not a sin, exactly. A trap, which is a thing that closes around an animal that was going about its ordinary business and did not see it.

You are not caught in this because you are weak, and Scripture calls it a snare rather than a flaw. Proverbs 29:25 puts the trap in the room rather than in the person. It is His Spirit, 2 Timothy 1:7 giving power and love and a sound mind, who is named as what a person is actually given instead of fear.

The ruling has already been made, by somebody with standing

Here is what turned it for me, and it is a legal picture rather than a warm one.

Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. (Romans 8:33)

Read the shape of that. It is a courtroom. Somebody is asking who is bringing the charge, and the answer is that the only Person qualified to bring one has already ruled the other way.

Which means the man in the third row is not a judge. He never was. He is a man with an opinion, and his opinion may be kind and may be useful and may even be right, and it is still not a ruling, because he does not hold the office.

I want to be careful and say that this is not permission to stop caring what people think. Scripture never asks for that and it would make a person insufferable. What it does is move the seat. His view is information. It is not the verdict.

You have already been ruled on by the only One with standing to rule. Romans 8:33 says it is God that justifieth, which closes the docket. It is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:15 called the Spirit of adoption, who makes a courtroom sentence land as belonging rather than as paperwork.

And if the weight of a person's opinion is doing more to you than that, say it out loud to somebody and not only to a page: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Carrying your whole worth on one other person's face is a genuine weight, not a personality quirk.