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I get there early, because early is my love language and my anxiety management. Dottie’s already holding the row, purse and sweater laid across the seats like a general holding ground. Bo’s in the spot that’s become his, next to mine, next to Luke’s, folding a bulletin into something that used to be paper and is now, he informs me, a boat.

“It floats,” he says.

“It’s paper,” I argue.

“It floats until it doesn’t,” he says and then goes back to folding.

The lights come down and the band comes up. I know more of the songs now than I don’t, which sounds like a small thing and isn’t. It reminds me of Gray and Ivy and I wonder when he’ll be coming back from paternity leave.

Luke sings low and a little behind the beat. Bo leans into his arm when the volume climbs. And I stand in the middle of my row of borrowed people and let the room do the thing I couldn’t have explained to you a year ago and still can’t, except that it works, and I’ve stopped needing to explain it.

Then everyone sits, and Pastor Jack comes up, and he preaches on words.

He starts in James, the part about the tongue being a small thing that sets a whole forest on fire, and I settle in, because I know this one. I’ve quoted a version of it to clients for years. Words land and stay. Nobody heals in a house where the words cut.

I’m nodding along, comfortable, a professional in her own field.

Then he turns it.

“We try to be careful about what we say to each other,” he says. “But I want to ask about the person you talk to more than anyone else alive. The one you never stop talking to. Yourself.”

I stop nodding.

“Proverbs says death and life are in the power of the tongue. We read that and think about what we say to other people. We never once think it might mean the tongue we use on ourselves.” He lets that sit. “Some of you have been preaching a sermon over your own life for years, and it is a mean one. You would never let anybody speak to your child the way you speak to yourself. You’d never let a friend believe about themselves what you’ve decided is just true about you.”

He’s describing my whole job. The reframe, the slow work of catching the automatic thought and holding it up to the light and asking a person whether it’s true or just old. I do it all day. I’m good at it.

I have apparently never once done it for myself.

I could tell you the day the sermon started. Seventeen, in a parking lot outside a church that isn’t this one, listening to two girls I’d worshiped next to on Wednesday take somebody apart on Thursday, and understanding all at once that the woman I’d handed my whole tender new faith to was living a life that looked nothing like the one she taught. I didn’t have the tools then. I couldn’t pull the people apart from the God. So I wrote a rule instead, the way a seventeen-year-old writes rules, in permanent marker, all caps.

They will always let you down. Don’t hand them anything you can’t afford to lose.

I’ve been reading it back to myself ever since.

Here is the sermon it became, preached calmly for ten years, in a voice so familiar I stopped hearing it as a voice at all. People leave. Church people especially. Don’t get comfortable. Keep the exits clear. Belonging is a bill that always comes due.

I’ve said it to myself so many times it stopped sounding like a thought and started sounding like weather. Just the climate I live in.

I sit in the third row between a ten-year-old and the man I love, and I think, for the first time in a long time, that I might be lying to myself in my own voice, and that I’ve been doing it so long I forgot it was a choice.

I don’t fix it right there. You don’t fix ten years in one morning. But I catch the thought and hold it up to the light, the way I’d make a client do.

It’s the first time I’ve ever turned the tools on myself.

And underneath that, a smaller thought, work-shaped. I’ve been handing people tools I don’t use. Tomorrow I’ve got a full schedule of people I’ll ask to be gentle with themselves while I run a private war on me. I don’t know what to do with that yet.

After service, Luke and I walk to life group. It’s our rhythm now.

The room’s half full when we get there, coffee going, the low pre-class hum of people who like each other. Luke gets pulled off almost the second we’re through the door, the way he always does now. Brandon and a couple of the guys have him by the coffee station inside a minute, and I catch the word “playoffs” and know I’ve lost him for a while.

I don’t mind. I’ve got my own.

“Okay, before class starts,” she says, which is how Natalie begins roughly everything. “How was your week?”

“Luke told me he loved me.”

“Olivia.” She grabs my arm hard enough to slosh the coffee. “I need every single detail.”