I Am Ashamed Of Where I Grew Up

You have three answers and you deploy them by context.

There is the vague one, which is the name of the city, and which works with strangers because a city is big and nobody asks a second question.

There is the funny one, which you use at work, where you make it into a joke about the bus route and everybody laughs and moves on.

And there is the one you gave a woman at a wedding in July, which was a lie. Not a large one. You named the next place over, which is four streets away and which is a different kind of place entirely, and you have thought about it since more than you would like to admit.

You are forty one.

You have a good life and people who love you and you have not lived on that street since you were nineteen.

And you still cannot say its name out loud in a room without something happening in your chest first.

What is actually being hidden

Let me be careful here, because there is a version of this article that would make it worse and it is the obvious one.

The obvious version says: be proud of where you come from, it made you who it made you. And that would land as nothing at all, because it asks for an emotion nobody in this position has about a place they know better than the person writing about it.

So I am not going to do that.

What I want to look at is what you think the street says.

Because you are not ashamed of the buildings. You are not embarrassed about a road surface. What you believe, somewhere well below your education and your job and your forty one years, is that the street is information about your value, and that people receiving the name are receiving that information.

You have been treating a street name as a disclosure about your worth, and no address anywhere has ever once carried information of that kind. The Holy Spirit is the one who was in that room at the wedding in July, and it is written in 1 Corinthians 1 that God hath chosen the base things of the world, and things which are despised.

And I want to name the cost, because you felt it in July and have not been able to put it down.

You told a small lie about four streets. And the reason it has stayed with you is not that it was a serious deception, because it was not.

It is that in order to avoid handing somebody information you had to hand them a false version of yourself, and doing that in a room full of people cost you something that the truth would not have cost.

You have been paying more to conceal it than it would ever once have cost to say it. First Corinthians 1 says God chose the base things and the things that are despised, and the Spirit of God is the one who chose them deliberately rather than in spite of what they were.

God hath chosen the base things

Here is the passage, and it is not gentle.

And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence. (1 Corinthians 1:28, King James Version)

Base things. Things which are despised.

Paul is not softening anything. He is not saying that the things people look down on are secretly fine, or that the despising was a misunderstanding. He uses the world's own vocabulary for them and then says God chose those.

That is the sentence I want to hand you, and notice what it is not.

It is not: those things are actually good, so be proud. It is: God selected from that pile on purpose, and the selecting is the point, and the reason given is so that no flesh should glory in his presence.

You were selected from the pile the world had already labeled, and God has never once needed a place to be respectable before He would choose out of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who put the choosing in the active voice, and the written word uses the world's own word for those things and says God chose them.

And here is why that is more use to you than being told to be proud.

Being proud would require a revaluing of the street, which cannot honestly be done by somebody who was there and knows what it was.

This does not ask you to revalue anything. It asks you to notice who has been doing the choosing, and to see that the choosing happened with the street exactly as it was, fully known, no upgrade applied.

You have been chosen out of a place that needed no improving first, and nothing about that street has ever once had to be revalued for God to have picked somebody out of it. First Corinthians 1 leaves the base things base and chooses anyway, and the Spirit of God is the one who did the picking.