Open Hands · Week 3 · Monday · INSECURITY
She gives a post about ninety minutes. That is the window she has worked out, without ever writing it down: if it has not moved by then, it is not going to move, and what it is going to say about her is already decided.
Last Tuesday it had not moved. So she deleted it.
And here is the part that matters, which most adults miss when they talk to a teenager about this: the deleting worked. The small sick feeling went away almost immediately. She was not being irrational. She had a problem, she had one lever, and the lever did exactly what she needed it to do.
What the lever also does, every single time she pulls it, is teach her something. It teaches her that the verdict is real, that the verdict belongs to other people, and that her job is to withdraw anything that might attract a bad one.
Before Any of It Happened
I want to put one scene next to hers.
As soon as Jesus was baptized, He went up out of the water. Suddenly the heavens were opened, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and resting on Him.Matthew 3:16 (BSB)
And a voice from heaven said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!”Matthew 3:17 (BSB)
Now look at the timing, because the timing is the whole thing.
At the moment that sentence is spoken, Jesus has not preached a sermon. He has not healed anyone. There is no crowd, no following, no miracle anyone has seen, nothing at all that a person could point to and say: that is why the Father said it.
The approval arrives before the ministry starts. Which means it was never a review. It was not issued in response to results, because there were no results yet to respond to. It is a statement about a relationship that was already true.
If the approval came before the work, the work was never what the approval was for.
What It Cost
She put something up on a Thursday. A photograph she actually liked, which is a more exposed thing than people realize — posting something you are indifferent about is safe, and posting something you like is not.
It did thirty-one views in a day.
She checked it at the ninety-minute mark. She checked it that evening. She checked it the next morning before school, lying in bed with the phone close to her face, doing the arithmetic she always does.
And she left it up.
Nothing was fixed by that. The number did not climb. Nobody came along and reassured her. She simply had to go on existing beside a piece of evidence that said, in the only language she currently trusts, that she is not much.
That is not a triumph. It is the first time she has let a verdict stand without appealing it, and it was a genuinely bad afternoon.
It is still up. She says she does not look at it anymore, which I believe about half of, and the half I believe is the half that counts.
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