Nobody Warns You About The Neck

Nobody sits a woman down and tells her.

There is a great deal of talk about faces and there is a great deal of talk about hair, and there is almost nothing said out loud about the part in between, and so it arrives with no warning at all and every woman thinks she is the only one.

You are not. Not by a very long way. It is the single most common thing women tell me about that they have never told anybody else.

But I do not want to spend this on the thing itself. I want to spend it on the closet.

Because at some point, without a decision, your wardrobe stopped being clothes and started being coverage.

There is a scarf you own that is not for warmth. You know exactly which one. There are collars you now buy and collars you now do not, and you could not say when the rule came in. There are two or three things hanging up that you love and do not wear, and there is a thing you wear far too often because it works.

None of that was planned. It happened one item at a time over about six years, and each individual decision was reasonable, and the total is a wardrobe built around one square foot of a body rather than around care for the woman wearing it.

What a wardrobe of avoidance costs

Let me count the cost, because it does not show up anywhere as a cost.

There is money, obviously, but that is the least of it.

There is the time. Every morning there is a small solving that happens before you get dressed, and it takes a minute or two, and it has happened about two thousand times.

There is the heat. Summer is now a negotiation, and there are days spent genuinely uncomfortable in order to be covered, and anybody who asked was told that you feel the cold.

And there are the things you love and do not wear, which sit there being a small reproach every time the door opens.

You are paying every morning for a rule nobody ever agreed to, and one square foot of you has never once been worth a wardrobe. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman what a habit has actually been costing, and Psalm 92 says something about what a person does in old age that nobody expects.

And here is the part I most want to name, because it is the one that lands.

Covering it has taught you that it needs covering.

That is the same mechanism every time. We conclude that a thing is unacceptable from the effort we put into hiding it. Six years of solving a problem every morning is six years of daily instruction that there is a problem, and the instruction came from you, and it was never in the mirror at all.

You are being taught daily by your own closet, and that lesson has never once come from anybody but the arrangement itself. Scripture in Psalm 92 puts fruitfulness in old age without any qualification attached, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a lesson off a woman that she has been teaching herself.

Fat and flourishing in old age

There is a line at the end of the ninety second Psalm that uses words nobody would choose today, and I want them exactly as they are.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing. (Psalm 92:14, King James Version)

Read what is being promised about a body in later life.

Still bringing forth fruit. Fat, which in that language means well fed, thriving, not lacking. Flourishing, which is a word about a plant doing exactly what a plant is meant to do.

Every one of those is a word of increase. There is no diminishment anywhere in that verse, and there is no suggestion that anything needs managing.

You are described in Scripture with words of increase, and there has never once been a verse that treated a body in later life as a thing to be handled. It is written in Psalm 92 that they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets those words land on a woman standing in front of a closet.

And notice where the verse sits in the psalm.

It comes after a description of trees planted in the house of the Lord. Planted somewhere, rooted, and left there long enough to do what a planted thing does.

The fruit in that image is not despite the years. It is because of them. Nothing bears late unless it has been in the ground a long time.

You are somebody bearing something that could not have come earlier, and there has never once been a way to get that fruit without the years that grew it. The Spirit of God is what puts a woman's later decades into a psalm rather than into a problem, and the written word says they shall be fat and flourishing.

One hour, in your own house

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately private.

Wear one thing you own and have been avoiding, for one hour, in your own house.

Not out. Not to anything. In your own kitchen, with the people who live there or with nobody, for one hour.

There are reasons for every part of that.

You are looking at something with reasons behind it, and there has never once been a part of this that arrived at random. Psalm 92 says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a woman read a reason where she had been reading a fault.

It is something you already own, so this costs nothing and requires nothing. It is one hour, because that is inside what is possible, and one hour of ordinary care costs nobody anything. And it is at home, because the point is not to be brave in public. The point is to find out what an hour actually feels like, which nobody has ever done, because the solving happens before it starts.

And do not check anything in the mirror during the hour. Put it on, get on with your evening, and take it off at the end if you want to.

I would guess that what happens is nothing. Almost certainly nothing. But nothing experienced is different from nothing predicted, and you have only ever had the prediction.

You are able to spend one hour in your own house without solving anything first, and there has never once been an hour of it tested. The written word in Psalm 92 says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one ordinary hour into care rather than into a test of nerve.