I Have The Words And Not The Voice

She could write it in about four minutes and it would be good.

That is not vanity. It is a fact about her the way being able to reverse a trailer is a fact about somebody else. She has written eulogies for two people. She wrote something for a colleague's leaving that got read out and that the woman still has in a frame, which she found out by accident and which made her go and stand in a stationery cupboard for a minute.

She has, in her head, worked out and refined over about eleven years, a way of saying the thing that is exactly true and not embarrassing and not the version other people say.

It has a shape. It starts somewhere unexpected and it does not use the two or three words she cannot stand and it lands on something plain.

She has never said one syllable of it out loud.

She is forty-seven. She has been a Christian since she was twenty-eight, in a way that reorganized her entire life from the inside and that almost nobody would be able to identify from the outside if they were told to look for it.

She has never said it to her husband, who knows and has never asked. She has never said it to the two women she walks with. She said something adjacent to it once at a funeral, in a way that could have been read as a general remark about the deceased, and the risk of that made her heart go for about ten minutes afterwards.

And the strange part, which she has never told anybody, is that she does not think she is ashamed of it.

She has tested that. She has sat with the question honestly. It is not shame. It is that the sentence has been in her chest for eleven years and has never once been through her mouth, and she has begun to suspect that a thing which has never been said out loud might not be entirely real.

Nobody is putting you in front of anybody

Let me settle the fear before anything else, because it is the one that would make you close this.

Nothing here asks you to say it to a person.

Not your husband, who knows. Not the two women you walk with. Not at a funeral, adjacent or otherwise, and not in any room with anybody in it at all.

This is the category where people are usually pushed, and I want you to know that I know that, and that the push is not coming, and that if it were coming you would smell it three paragraphs out and you would be right to stop reading.

Now let me go straight at the suspicion, because it is the actual subject and it is a good deal more interesting than the fear.

A thing which has never been said out loud might not be entirely real.

You are closer to something true there than most people get, and I want to affirm the instinct before I correct the conclusion.

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.Romans 10:9

Notice that Paul puts both in. The mouth and the heart, in one sentence, joined.

He could have written it with the heart alone and a great deal of Christian history would have been simpler. He did not. He named the mouth, first in the sentence, and the reason is not that God needs to hear it. It is that a human being is not a mind in a jar, and something happens in a person when a thing goes from the interior out through the body into air.

So your instinct is right: saying it out loud does something.

You are somebody in whom the heart half has been true for eleven years, and that is not in question and it is not what this page is about, and the word says the belief and the confession belong together, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the eleven years rather than on a verse you could exegete better than most.

Now here is the correction, and it is small and it matters.

Paul says confess with thy mouth. He does not say in front of witnesses. The verse names an organ, not an audience.

That distinction has been lost in about a thousand sermons, and it has left a great many articulate, private people believing that the confession is a public performance they have never managed, when what is actually named is a physical act involving a tongue and some air.

You are not required to produce a room. Scripture asks for a mouth, and the Spirit of God has been in you since twenty-eight, and the sentence you have refined for eleven years is not waiting on an occasion. It is waiting on a doorway and a Tuesday morning.

I want to say one more thing, about the stationery cupboard.

You found out by accident that something you wrote is in a frame in a woman's house, and you had to go and stand in a cupboard for a minute.

You already know what happens when your words get out of you. They land. They keep landing years later, in frames, in houses. And the only set of words you have ever written that has never left your chest is the one about the thing that reorganized your entire life. The Holy Spirit is the one who has kept the unsaid one alive in there for eleven years without letting it go stale.

That is the asymmetry, and today is the day it ends, and it ends alone in a room with the door shut.

You are somebody in whom the heart half has been settled for eleven years, and that has never been the question. Scripture joins the mouth and the heart in one sentence and names an organ rather than an audience, and the Holy Spirit has been in you since twenty-eight.