I Edit It Before I Say It

You do it on the stairs, mostly.

You sit down about four steps up, which is a thing you have done since you were small, and you start to say something, and before it gets out of your mouth you have already been over it twice.

The first pass takes out the wobble. The second pass makes it sound more like something a person who trusts God would say.

By the time it leaves you it is a good sentence. It is measured. It has no hedges in it. If somebody were listening at the bottom of the stairs they would think, that woman knows exactly where she stands.

And what you actually had, before the edits, was something much rougher and about four words long.

You have never once said the rough version.

Not in a small group. Not on your own on the stairs at half past eleven with nobody in the house but you and the cat. Not once, in about six years.

Before we go anywhere, let me say something.

I am not telling you off.

There is nothing dishonest in this. Tidying a sentence before you say it is what a considerate person does, and you have been considerate to God the way you are considerate to everybody, and I am not going to reframe six years of care as deceit.

I am saying I know there is a rough version. That is all.

What is already being carried

Here is a sentence that most people find surprising the first time somebody points it out to them.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

Read the admission in the middle. We know not what we should pray for as we ought.

Paul is not describing beginners. He is describing everybody, himself included, as people who genuinely do not know how to do this properly.

And the solution he gives is not that we get better at it. The solution is that the Spirit is already carrying it, and the word he uses for what the Spirit carries is groanings which cannot be uttered, which means the unspeakable version, the one with no words on it at all.

So the rough four words are not the thing that needs fixing before it goes up. The rough four words are further along than most of what gets edited.

So here it is, said directly to you, on the stairs with the light from the landing.

You are already being carried in a form that has no words on it. Not one day, not once you can say something better, not when your praying gets steadier. Right now, four steps up at half past eleven, you are inside a verse that assumes nobody knows how to do this properly, and it was written by a man who put himself in that sentence. That is not my reassurance. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and lands it on a real person on a real staircase.

Now, why the editing?

Because a rough sentence sounds, in your own ears, like it might be an accusation.

That is the mechanism, and I think it has been half seen from the inside already. When the unedited version comes up, it has an edge on it, and the edge feels like it might be aimed at God, and nothing gets aimed at God in this house, so the edge comes off before it goes.

That is not faithlessness. That is reverence doing something slightly wrong with a good motive, which is one of the most common conditions in the whole of the Christian life and almost nobody talks about it.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have the unedited version already in transit, and it went before you started tidying. The word says cannot be uttered, which is a phrase about something beyond words rather than something below them, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise into a real house at a real hour of the night.

He is not going to be startled. There is nothing you could say on those stairs that is rougher than what is already being groaned on your behalf.