The Search Result Is Not the Verdict

Tara has stopped applying for things and she has never said that out loud in exactly those words.

What she says is that she is being strategic. What she says is that it is a bad market and she wants the right fit and there is no point going for something she does not really want. All of that is true in the way that a good excuse is usually true.

What actually happens is this. She gets to the last field of the form, the one where you paste in the link to your work, and she thinks about somebody typing her name into a search box afterwards. And she knows exactly what the first result is. She has known for eleven months.

It is not a lie. That is the thing about it. It happened, and it was public, and the account of it is broadly accurate.

And it took about a week, and she has now been living in the eleven months on the other side of that week, and the week is what a stranger meets first.

Here is what that has done to her that nobody sees.

She has started introducing herself with a slightly different emphasis, testing whether the person already knows. She can tell within about four seconds now. There is a particular half beat of recalibration and she has become an expert in it, which is a horrible expertise to have.

And there is a second thing, which is heavier, and it does not fit anywhere in a conversation about search results.

People were hurt. Not hypothetically. Actual people, with names she knows, who did not choose any of this and who carry it now as well. That is a separate weight from the public one and it is a real weight, and she does not want a message that tidies it away in order to make her feel better about a form field.

So we are not going to do that.

And this is where I stop writing about Tara, because you know what comes up when somebody types your name.

I am not going to ask what happened. Not once, not in a hint. And I am not going to pretend nobody was affected, because that would insult you.

Where your glory is kept

I want to hand you a verse that is not about reputation and turns out to be entirely about it.

In God is my salvation and my glory: the rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God.Psalm 62:7

Glory, in that line, is the old word for weight, for substance, for the thing that makes a person count. It is roughly what we mean when we say standing.

And read where David puts it. Not in his record. Not in the public account. In God. He is saying: the place where my weight is kept is not a place any person has access to.

Now look at who wrote it and when. Psalm 62 comes out of a season when David's name was being used against him publicly and by people who knew him. The next verse but one says they delight in lies, they bless with their mouth and curse inwardly. He is not writing from a quiet study. He is writing from the middle of exactly what you are in, and the Holy Spirit had it kept so that somebody eleven months into a search result would have it in their hands.

And this is what he does about it, which is the whole thing: he does not argue. He relocates.

So take that where you actually live. Your standing is not stored anywhere a stranger can reach it, and Psalm 62:7 says your glory is kept in God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that real in you rather than a nice line you already knew.

Now the part that keeps this honest, because you would not trust a message that skipped it.

Relocating your standing does not undo damage to other people. Psalm 62 does not say the harm was nothing. It says where the writer's own weight is kept while he faces it. Those are two different questions and Scripture never collapses them, and neither will we: what God has settled about you is settled, and what needs putting right where it can be put right stays a live and honorable thing in front of the Holy Spirit for as long as it takes.