Something Happened And I Never Said What

Everybody thinks you lost interest. You have let them think it for two years.

It is the easiest explanation and it costs nothing. Somebody asks whether you are still doing it and you say it fell away, or you got busy, and they nod, because that is what usually happens and nobody probes a thing like that.

And the actual reason is one afternoon in November which you have never described to a living person.

I am not going to guess at it and I do not need to. What I know from the shape of this is that something specific happened, and that it was humiliating enough to end two years of work in a single day, and that you have carried it unsaid ever since.

I want to say the true thing before anything useful.

The not saying is now doing more damage than the thing did, and that is almost always the case with this kind of afternoon.

So I am not going to tell you to talk to somebody about it. That is what people say when they have run out of anything specific, and it puts the whole weight back on you with no instructions attached.

Let me show you what a man in scripture did with something he could not tell people.

I poured out my complaint before him

There is a psalm written in a cave by a man with nowhere to put what had happened to him.

I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble. (Psalm 142:2, King James Version)

I shewed before him my trouble.

Now notice both halves of that, because they are two different actions and the psalm names them separately. Poured out is about volume, and shewed is about detail. He does not summarize. He shows, which means he goes through the particulars of it.

You have somewhere to put the particulars of that afternoon, and a thing shown in detail has never once needed a human being in the room to be heard. Psalm 142:2 has a man lay out the specifics rather than the summary, and the Holy Spirit is the one sitting with somebody who has said nothing for two years.

Now stay on where he was when he said it, because it changes what the psalm is for.

A cave. On his own. The heading on that psalm puts him hiding, which means there was nobody available to tell, and this was not a choice between a friend and God. There was no friend that week.

That is the situation the psalm was written for, and it is yours.

You have never once been without a place to take this, and an afternoon with nobody to tell has never once been an afternoon that had to stay inside a man. The Holy Spirit is the one who receives a thing said out loud in an empty room, and Psalm 142:2 is written by somebody with no human being available.

And here is the third thing, which is what he calls it.

My complaint. Not my failure, and not my sin. He does not moralize the thing before he brings it. He calls it a complaint and a trouble, which is language for something that happened to a man rather than something he did.

You are permitted to bring this without first deciding whose fault it was, and a trouble has never once needed to be classified before it can be poured out. Psalm 142:2 names it as complaint and trouble and nothing else, and the Spirit of God is the one with a man who has been carrying one November afternoon.

Unsaid things grow, said ones do not

Here is the practical half, and it is about what two years of silence has actually done.

It has grown. Not from being thought about, and possibly it has hardly been thought about at all. Unsaid things grow by a different mechanism.

A thing that is never described never gets its edges checked. It stays exactly the size it was at the moment it happened, and everything around it moves on and shrinks in the ordinary way, so it becomes proportionally larger every year without anything being added to it.

That is why it can end two years of work and still be unmentionable.

You have been carrying something that has never once had its edges checked, and an undescribed thing has never once stayed its original size. The Spirit of God is the one with a man who has kept one afternoon out of every conversation for two years, and Psalm 142:2 asks for the particulars rather than the summary.

Now here is what saying it out loud actually does, and it is not what people usually claim.

It does not make it smaller by magic. What it does is much more ordinary. When a thing is described in words, it acquires a shape and a length. It becomes a thing that took four minutes on a Tuesday in November rather than a permanent condition, and that is not reframing, that is just what happens when something gets a boundary put round it.

You have never once heard that afternoon described, including by yourself.

You have never once heard the whole of it out loud, and a thing spoken into an empty room has never once come back the same size. Psalm 142:2 separates the pouring out from the showing and asks for both, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a room with a man saying something for the first time.

And here is the thing about the two years, said plainly and with no rebuke in it.

They were not wasted and the work is not gone. Whatever you had in November is still mostly in you, and a man who has carried something unsaid for two years has been doing the harder version of every single day, and nobody has ever known to credit him for it.

You have been doing all of this while carrying something nobody knew about, and a man under an extra weight has never once been the weaker one for it. The Spirit of God is the one who has known the whole of it the entire time, and the written word has a man in a cave lay out his trouble in detail.

Say it out loud to God, then open it

So here is the assignment, and the first half happens alone.

Open it once today without going back to the beginning of anything.

But before you open it, do the other thing. On your own, out loud, in a room with the door shut, say what happened in November.

Not a summary. The particulars. The room, the people in it, the words said, and what happened next. Out loud, in ordinary words, to God.

You have a room and a door and about four minutes, and an afternoon described out loud has never once been harder to say than it was to carry. Psalm 142:2 asks for the showing of the trouble and not the summarizing of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a closed room with a man saying it for the first time in two years.

And here is what to expect, because it is usually not dramatic.

It will take less time than you think. Most of these take about four minutes to describe fully, which is itself information, because a thing that takes four minutes to say has been occupying two years.

You may feel nothing much afterward. That is fine and it is not a failure of the exercise. The boundary has still been put round it whether you felt it happen or not. Then open the book, take ten words, and stop, because ten words is the assignment and today owes you nothing more.

You have permission to feel nothing afterward and open it anyway, and a thing described once has never once needed a feeling attached to have been said. The Spirit of God is the one who was in the room in November and is in the room today, and Psalm 142:2 was written by a man with nobody else to tell.