I Have Carried It So Long It Is Furniture

She does not think about it. That is the first thing to understand and it is the strangest.

If you asked her what is weighing on her she would have to stop and think, and she would probably come up with her knees, and the roof, and a granddaughter in a difficult marriage, and she would give you those three in that order and she would not be being evasive.

It is not on the list because it stopped being an item about thirty years ago and became a feature of the room.

Here is how you would know it is there, if you were in her kitchen for a week.

She does not say a certain year out loud. She will say "before your father was born" or "around when we had the blue car" and she has been doing it so long that nobody in that family has noticed it is a technique.

She does not go into one particular town. It is nineteen miles away and it has a good market and her sister used to live there and she has not been in it since her sister died and she said something about parking at the time and everybody accepted it.

And there is a hymn. She hums it, at the sink, constantly. She does not sing the third verse. She goes quiet for eight bars and comes back in, every time, and has done for three decades, and if you asked her about it she would say she has never liked the tune of that bit.

She is seventy-eight.

She has confessed it to God once, properly, in a chair, in the year it happened, and she has never doubted for a second that He heard her. She would say so quite firmly. She is not a woman with a shaky doctrine of forgiveness.

She has just built a house around it since, room by room, without noticing, and she lives in the house, and the house is comfortable, and the thing is load-bearing.

What is still being carried

I want to start with the confession, because you are going to need to know that I am not undoing it.

You told God, once, properly, in a chair, in the year it happened. And He heard you, and it was dealt with, and you are right about that and you have been right for thirty years. Nothing on this page suggests you did it wrong or that you need to do it again, and I would want you to be quite firm with anybody who told you otherwise.

So this is not about forgiveness. It is about a house.

Because a thing can be entirely forgiven and still be structural, and that is the situation you are in: God has not been holding it for thirty years, and you have, not as guilt but as architecture, and there is a difference between those two that most people never get told about.

Now here is the verse, and I want you to notice something odd in it that people usually read past.

I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.Psalm 32:5

Look at how much of that verse is about the saying.

I acknowledged. I have not hid. I said, I will confess. Three clauses of a man describing the act of bringing it out into speech, and then one short clause at the end in which God does everything.

David spends most of the sentence on the coming out of hiding, and then the forgiveness arrives in six words.

You are forgiven and the iniquity of your sin was taken thirty years ago, and that is not encouragement for a woman of seventy-eight, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the house rather than on a doctrine you hold correctly.

Now let me say something about the three things.

The year you do not say. The town you do not go into. The eight bars you do not sing.

None of those is a sin and none of them needs confessing. They are the walls of the house, and they went up one at a time, quietly, each of them sensible at the moment it was built, and now they are simply how the rooms are shaped.

But look at what they cost. There is a market town nineteen miles away with your sister in it. There are eight bars of a hymn you have not sung in thirty years. There is a year of your own life that your grandchildren have never heard you name.

You are living in a house you built around something God took away. Scripture puts the forgiving in six words at the end of a verse that is otherwise about coming out of hiding, and the Spirit of God has been in that kitchen with you at that sink for every one of those hums, including the eight bars of silence.

I want to say one more thing, and it is the thing I would say if I were sitting at that table.

You have never once been asked to keep it in the room. The word says the iniquity was forgiven and the Spirit is the seal on it, and the reason the walls went up was not that God required them. It was that a woman in her forties needed somewhere to put a thing that had already been dealt with, and had nowhere else to put it, and so she made space.

You can have the space back.

And if what is on you is heavier than this, if it has got as far as not wanting to be here at all, please tell one human being today. A doctor, a crisis line in your own country, one person who can sit with you. That is not a detour from any of this. It is part of it, and you are worth the phone call.

You are forgiven, and it took six words at the end of a verse that was otherwise about coming out of hiding. The written word says He forgave the iniquity of your sin, and the Holy Spirit has stood at that sink with you through thirty years of eight silent bars.