I Left One and Found Another

You got out. That took eighteen months and it cost you three friendships and a great deal of sleep.

Where you were, one voice decided things. Not by force; nobody was locked in anywhere. It was subtler and it worked better than force: there was a way of seeing things, and it came from one place, and questioning it was possible in principle and expensive in practice.

You left. You were right to and you would do it again.

And about a year later you were reading something, and you found yourself working out whether the person who wrote it would approve of a decision you were making about your own week.

Not whether they were right. Whether they would approve.

You put the phone down and sat there for a while, because you have felt that exact thing before, in a building you do not go to any more.

The content is entirely different. This person would have been considered dangerous where you came from, and half of what they say is a direct contradiction of what you were taught.

The shape is identical. There is a voice, and it decides, and you have handed it the deciding.

You did not carry a doctrine out of that place. You carried a habit, and the habit is portable, and it does not care what it is attached to.

What this page will not do

I am not going to name either voice. Not the one you left and not the one you found, and this site will never hand you a target, including a target you have already picked out yourself. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Galatians 1:10, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

I am not going to tell you that all teaching is dangerous or that you should trust nobody. That is not freedom; it is the same fear wearing a different coat, and it produces people who are alone with their own opinions and considerably more suggestible than they think.

And I am not going to relitigate the place you left. You have done that for eighteen months and you know what happened. Scripture stands under that in Galatians 1:10, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

What I am going to name is the habit, because the habit is the thing you brought with you and it is the only part of this you can actually work on.

You are not weak for having repeated it. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not withdrawn from somebody who has done the same thing twice, and the Holy Spirit is at that gate with a woman who noticed something she did not want to notice.

The verse is about whose approval is being sought

There is a line in Galatians where Paul asks a question about himself, out loud, in a letter.

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 that it is a question rather than a boast. He is examining himself in public, and the thing he is examining is not his doctrine. It is his motive: whose approval is operating.

And notice the word yet. If I yet pleased men. It implies he used to, and that he knows exactly what it feels like, and that this is a live question rather than a settled one.

Then the last clause: I should not be the servant of Christ.

He is not saying pleasing people is unkind. He is saying it is a rival service, that a person can only be under one final authority, and that whichever one is operating is the one you are actually serving. It is written, in Galatians 1:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

That is what you found when you put the phone down. Not that you had adopted bad doctrine, but that a different service had quietly started up.

You are not serving two masters by accident forever. Scripture says for do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men, Galatians 1:10, and Paul asks it of himself as a live question rather than announcing it as a settled achievement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that question askable without shame.

Why the habit traveled

This is worth understanding, because it will stop you concluding that you are simply the kind of person who gets captured. Scripture settles that in Galatians 1:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

Where you came from, deciding for yourself was genuinely costly. Not forbidden; costly, which is more effective. So over years you built a very efficient internal process: before acting, check what the voice would say.

That process is a skill. It kept you safe and it kept you belonging and it was, in that environment, entirely rational.

Skills do not switch off because the environment changes. You left the building and the process came with you, running, looking for an input, and within a year it found one.

That is not a character defect. It is a trained reflex that has outlived its context, and reflexes are unlearned by practice rather than by insight.

You are not the sort of person who cannot be free. Scripture says stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage, Galatians 5:1, and the warning about becoming entangled again is written to people who had already been freed once, and the Holy Spirit is not surprised by a second entanglement.

What unlearning it looks like

Not a purge. Do not unfollow everybody; that is the reflex operating in reverse, and in six months you will have found somebody else.

Practice deciding.

This week, take one small thing. What you do on Saturday. Whether you go to a thing. Something with no moral content at all and no consequence beyond your own week.

Decide it without checking. Not defiantly; simply notice the check starting and do not run it.

It will feel unstable. That is the reflex, and it is the muscle you are working. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Galatians 1:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

Then do it again next week with something slightly larger. And when it comes to something that genuinely warrants counsel, get counsel, from more than one person, and then decide yourself, which is a completely different action from adopting somebody's position.

You are not without the standing to decide your own week. Scripture says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, Romans 14:5, and the persuading is located in the individual rather than delegated, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person back their own deciding.