She has never told anybody. Not one person, in a very long life.
Not her sister, who died in the spring and who she thinks may have known. Not the doctor, who asked her a question about eight years ago in a way that made it clear he was giving her a door, and she said something about the stairs. Not her daughter, certainly not her daughter.
The rule is older than she is. Her own mother kept it, and her mother's mother by all accounts, and it was never written down or explained. It was simply what a woman does, and what she does not do is say.
She is seventy-three now. And what has started happening lately, since the funeral, is that she has begun to hear the rule as a sentence somebody said rather than as a fact about the world, and she cannot un-hear it.
She has caught herself twice this month starting to tell somebody. Both times she got as far as an opening and then said something about the stairs.
And here is what she has never said out loud, to God or to anybody: she does not know whether the rule was ever true, and she is running out of years to find out.
The plain thing first
Before anything else on this page, and said as plainly as it can be said.
Nothing here asks you to stay anywhere unsafe. Nothing here asks you to make peace with harm. There is no verse in the Bible and no sentence in this article that requires a woman to hand herself over to be hurt, at seventy-three or at any age.
If what is happening is dangerous, get safe first and work the rest out afterward. Tell one real person who can actually do something: your doctor, the police if there is danger tonight, a domestic abuse service where you live, a nurse, a social worker, somebody at a church who has training rather than an opinion. Being safe is not a failure of peace and it is not a failure of a marriage and it is not disloyalty to anybody.
You are not required to absorb this, and being seventy-three does not change one word of that. Do not read that as flattery. Psalm 11:5 says the Lord's soul hates the one who loves violence, which is His own stated position rather than an inference, and the Holy Spirit is the one bringing it now to get a woman out from underneath something rather than further beneath it.
Look at where the rule came from
You have carried that rule your whole life and you have never once been able to look at it, because a thing that old stops looking like a rule and starts looking like the weather.
But it came from somewhere. It was handed to you by a woman who had been handed it by another woman, and not one of them chose it, and not one of them was ever asked.
That is a very different thing from a commandment. It is a habit that outlived the reasons for itself, and it has been passed hand to hand through a family for a hundred years without anybody stopping to ask whether God ever said it.
You are not breaking a commandment and you never were, and no line of it appears anywhere in Scripture. Psalm 34:17 puts the opposite in the book, where the righteous cry and the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman that crying out is the pattern rather than the failure.
What Scripture actually does with a cry
Read the pattern all the way through and it is unmistakable. Israel cried and He heard. Hannah spoke out of her bitterness at the door of the tabernacle and it is recorded with approval. Half the psalms are somebody saying out loud, at volume, that something is wrong.
Nowhere in any of it is a woman commended for not saying.
The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles.Psalm 34:17
Cry is the verb. Out loud, to somebody. It is the first half of the sentence and the hearing follows it, and the whole of Scripture is comfortable with the noise of it.
You have permission that predates the rule by three thousand years, and it is written down. Psalm 34:17 puts the crying inside the definition of the righteous rather than outside it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a kitchen where a woman has said something about the stairs twice this month.
Your mother was never the enemy. She was keeping the rule that had been given to her, in a time when saying it out loud would very likely have cost her everything and helped nobody.
That was then. And this is a different world with different doors in it, and you have already found one of those doors twice this month and stood in front of it.
> Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. > Proverbs 31:8
That verse is in the chapter about a woman of worth, which is the same chapter your whole tradition of silence would have been read out of. You are inside a chapter that opens a mouth rather than closes one, and the opening is what is commended there. Proverbs 31:8 puts speech in the mouth of the very woman that passage holds up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies the sentence when a door presents itself for the third time.
Nothing here tells you what to do about your house. This page does not know your situation and it will not pretend to. What is being handed to you is smaller and much heavier than a plan: a rule identified as a rule, and a door that somebody has confirmed is really a door.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud, right where you are sitting. Not in your head. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to say what is true about your own life was given to you, and no tradition can hand it over or take it back. Scripture is the ground under every word, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living instead of loud.
Jesus set the measure at a seed, and He did not set it that low to shame anybody with how little she was holding. He set it there because no mountain ever moved on the size of a woman's faith. It moved because somebody opened her mouth at it. So speak, and leave the rest with Him, because whatever He does with that house is His and always was.
- Rule I was raised on, you are not from God and He never handed you down. Psalm 34:17 says the righteous cry and He hears, and crying is the verb and there is not one word about keeping it in. In the name of Jesus I am setting you down.
- Fear that saying it betrays my mother, you have no authority in this kitchen. The Holy Spirit knows the difference between a commandment and an accommodation, and Mark 7:8 says a tradition of men can be held while God's own word is laid aside. I am here as myself today, and I am not absorbing this.
- Lord, You have been in this house for fifty-one years and You have heard every single thing that was never said. I thank You, because Your word says You hate the love of violence and You have never once required my silence. Whatever You do with that house is Yours, and the one step in front of me is mine, and I am taking it today.
Psalm 34:17
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