The Thing I Have Never Said

There is a back kitchen he can still walk around from memory.

Green units. A window over the sink that never shut properly, so there was always a draught along the floor by the bin. A radio on the shelf with a bent aerial. He could tell you which drawer stuck and how hard you had to lift it to get it open, and he has not stood in that room in thirty one years.

He goes there most weeks anyway. Not on purpose. It comes on its own, usually in the gap between putting the light off and going to sleep, and it always starts in the same place, at the door, and it always shows him the same two minutes.

He has never told anyone. Not his wife of twenty six years. Not the man he prays with on a Tuesday. Not a priest, not a counselor, not his brother, not once, not in any form, not even sideways as a story about somebody else. He has carried it in one piece and completely alone for three decades, and by now the carrying has its own weight, separate from the thing itself.

Here is what nobody understands from the outside. The silence is not deceit. He is not getting away with anything. The silence is a room he built to keep the shame from touching the people he loves, and the walls of it were built out of love, and it is the loneliest room in his house.

And so he has a strange relationship with God on a Sunday. He sings. He means it. And there is one part of him standing at the back of the church with his arms folded, watching himself worship, saying quietly: He knows, though.

Yes. He does.

That is not the threat you have been treating it as for thirty one years. Stay with me, because that sentence is about to turn all the way over.

The one who already knows is the safest one to tell

David wrote a psalm about exactly this, and the interesting part is not the forgiveness. Everybody expects the forgiveness. The interesting part is what he says the silence was costing him.

He describes his bones wasting away and a groan going on all day long and a kind of summer drought inside him. Not because God was refusing him. Because he was holding something with a closed hand and it was drying him out from the inside. Then comes the turn.

I made known my sin to You, and my guilt I did not cover. I said, I will confess my wrongdoing to the Lord, and You forgave the guilt of my sin.Psalm 32:5

Read the shape of that verse carefully, because there is a mercy in the grammar.

He says I said, I will confess. He announces the intention. And then, in the same breath, before the sentence has even finished telling us that he did it, the forgiveness has already happened. God did not wait for a full account. He did not require the details, the dates, the names, or a properly worded statement. The man turned toward Him with an open hand and it was done.

That is your God. That is who is in the room while you are reading this.

Now let me take three weights off you, one at a time, because I think you are carrying all three.

The first: telling God is not informing God. He was not unaware. He has known since the afternoon it happened, and He has been loving you the entire time you assumed the knowing would end the loving. Naming it to Him is not a confession in a courtroom. It is opening a hand you have been keeping closed in the presence of somebody who could see what was in it the whole time.

The second: nobody here is asking you to tell a person. Not me, not this message, not God. There are good reasons a wise person tells a safe human being one day, and there are also good reasons that day is not today, and both can be true. Your shame is not going to be settled by a disclosure to somebody who might drop it. It is going to be settled by the One who bought it. If you never speak it to another human being as long as you live, you are not one degree less forgiven.

The third, and this is the one that keeps people locked in for decades: you are not being asked to feel forgiven before you are forgiven. Feeling is weather. Covering is legal. The blood of Christ did not become effective on the day a man finally managed to feel clean about himself. It was effective at the cross, and what it covers it covers whether or not the man in the back kitchen can feel the warmth of it yet.

I want to say the plainest thing in this whole message now, and I want to say it as a man who carries scrolls of declarations and not one of judgment.

You are not what you did in that room.

You have been introducing yourself to God for thirty one years as the thing that happened. He has never once used that name for you. He has been calling you by the name He gave you, patiently, over the top of the other one, every Sunday you stood at the back with your arms folded.