{"id":606,"date":"2026-08-13T05:25:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T10:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/?p=606"},"modified":"2026-08-13T05:26:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T10:26:00","slug":"it-was-still-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/2026\/08\/13\/it-was-still-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"It Was Still Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<!-- POST TITLE: It Was Still Wrong -->\n<style>@import url('https:\/\/fonts.googleapis.com\/css2?family=Oswald:wght@400;500;700&family=Lora:ital,wght@0,400;0,500;1,400&display=swap');\n.psn{--bg:#F6EAD8;--darkest:#2A1512;--mid:#A6321C;--heading:#E2661C;--cool:#5B3A63;--light:#F0A93C;--surface-verse:#EFDCC1;--surface-deep:#F0E2CC;afont-family:'Lora',Georgia,serif;color:var(--darkest);background:var(--bg);max-width:720px;margin:2em auto;padding:2.5em 2em;line-height:1.7;font-size:1.05em}\n.psn .eyebrow{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.85em;letter-spacing:.18em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--mid);font-weight:500;margin:0 0 .4em}\n.psn h2{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.3em;letter-spacing:.08em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--mid);margin:2em 0 .7em;border-bottom:1px solid var(--heading);padding-bottom:.3em}\n.psn .verse{font-family:'Lora',Georgia,serif;font-style:italic;font-size:1.08em;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:normal;background:var(--surface-verse);border-left:4px solid var(--heading);padding:1.1em 1.4em;margin:1.4em 0;color:var(--darkest)}\n.psn .verse-cite{display:block;font-style:normal;font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.82em;letter-spacing:.1em;color:var(--mid);margin-top:.6em;text-transform:uppercase}\n.psn .divider{border:none;border-top:1px solid var(--heading);margin:2em auto;width:80px}\n.psn p{margin:0 0 1.1em}\n.psn .pull{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.15em;letter-spacing:.04em;color:var(--darkest);border-top:1px solid var(--heading);border-bottom:1px solid var(--heading);padding:1em 0;margin:1.6em 0;text-align:center;line-height:1.4}\n.psn .psn-deep{background:var(--surface-deep);border-left:4px solid var(--cool);padding:1.1em 1.4em;margin:1.4em 0}\n@media (max-width:600px){.psn{padding:1.6em 1.2em}}<\/style>\n<div class=\"psn\">\n<p class=\"eyebrow\">Passion \u00b7 Week 2 \u00b7 Thursday<\/p>\n<p>She is forty-three, and something happened in her house when she was a girl, and her mother has never really talked about it.<\/p>\n<p>Not denied. That would almost be easier \u2014 denial is at least a position, and you can push against a position. This is smoother than denial. Her mother calls every Sunday afternoon, cheerful, full of news about the neighbors, and speaks to her as though the ledger were balanced. As though there were no ledger.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday I wrote about a man who had gotten very good at telling his story. This is not that. She almost never tells anyone. She isn&#8217;t collecting, she isn&#8217;t performing, and there is no four-minute version \u2014 if you asked her directly she&#8217;d probably change the subject.<\/p>\n<p>What she is doing is hoping.<\/p>\n<p>Every Sunday call is an audition. She leaves an opening, small and well-placed, somewhere around minute twelve. A question angled just so. A pause in the exact spot where a person who wanted to say something could say it. And every Sunday her mother walks straight past it, talking about the neighbors, and she hangs up and feels the specific flatness of a thing not happening again.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pull\">Twenty-nine years of Sundays, and the opening still gets left.<\/p>\n<p>That is not bitterness the way we usually picture it. There&#8217;s no rage in it. It&#8217;s closer to hunger \u2014 a want that has stayed exactly the same size for three decades because it has never once been fed.<\/p>\n<p>And it is costing her something she has stopped noticing. She cannot be in the room with her mother, because she is always partly in the room she&#8217;s waiting for. Every actual conversation gets graded against the one that isn&#8217;t happening.<\/p>\n<div class=\"verse\">Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but leave room for God&#8217;s wrath. For it is written: &#8220;Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, says the Lord.&#8221;<span class=\"verse-cite\">Romans 12:19 (BSB)<\/span><\/div>\n<p>Here is what I want to be careful to say, because it gets said wrong constantly and the wrong version has hurt people.<\/p>\n<p>This verse does not say nothing happened. It does not say it wasn&#8217;t serious, or that she should decide it was fine, or that a good Christian woman would be over it. It says the opposite of all that. Vengeance exists in this sentence. Repayment exists. There is a wrong here substantial enough that God Himself names it as something that will be answered.<\/p>\n<p>What she is being asked to release is not the verdict. It&#8217;s the gavel.<\/p>\n<p>She has been trying to hold court for twenty-nine years \u2014 to get the finding entered by the one witness who won&#8217;t testify. Paul&#8217;s instruction is that the case is real, and the case is not hers to try, and there is a judge who does not require her mother&#8217;s cooperation to reach a ruling.<\/p>\n<div class=\"psn-deep\">\n<p>Say plainly what this costs, because it is the heaviest cost in the week. She does not get the apology. Not deferred \u2014 gone. Handing off the verdict means giving up the thing she has organized twenty-nine years of Sundays around, and receiving in exchange something she cannot see, on a timetable she does not control, from a judge she has to take on trust.<\/p>\n<p>That is not a lesser thing to ask than everything else this week. It is a much larger one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h2>The Call<\/h2>\n<p>Sunday, three in the afternoon, the phone lights up.<\/p>\n<p>She can run the call the way she&#8217;s run twelve hundred of them \u2014 leave the opening, angle the question, wait through minute twelve with her whole chest tight.<\/p>\n<p>Or she can pick it up and let it be the call it actually is. Twenty minutes about the neighbors, from a woman who is not going to say the thing, with the wrong still on the books and no longer on hers to collect.<\/p>\n<h2>What To Do Today<\/h2>\n<p>Tell one person \u2014 not the person who owes you \u2014 this sentence, out loud: <em>I&#8217;m not getting the apology, and I&#8217;m going to stop pricing the relationship on it.<\/em> Then ask them to check on you about it in a month.<\/p>\n<p>Say it to someone because saying it in your head doesn&#8217;t count and won&#8217;t hold. You will re-decide this. Probably Sunday. You want someone else to have heard it.<\/p>\n<p>And do not expect the hunger to go quiet this week. It has been the same size since you were fourteen. What changes first is not the wanting. It&#8217;s that the call stops being an audition.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Passion \u00b7 Week 2 \u00b7 Thursday She is forty-three, and something happened in her house when she was a girl, and her mother has never really talked about it. Not denied. That would almost be easier \u2014 denial is at&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":607,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-passion"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/20260813BLOG.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":608,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606\/revisions\/608"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}