I Was Taught Not To Say It Out Loud

You were about twelve and you were sitting on a hard chair and somebody at the front said it, and it went in like a nail.

Do not give voice to it. What you speak, you feed.

They meant it protectively. That is the thing to hold onto here. The person who said it had watched people talk themselves into a hole and they were trying to keep a room full of children out of one, and they were not a bad person and they were not being careless.

But you were twelve, and you took it home, and it became a rule.

And for thirty five years you have not said a doubt out loud.

Not in a prayer meeting. Not to your husband. Not on your own in the kitchen with the window open and nobody in the house. Every one of them has been managed internally, and you have gotten extremely good at the managing, and it has cost you something you could not put a number on.

Before we go a step further, hear this.

I am not correcting you.

You did not do anything wrong at twelve and you have not done anything wrong since. Following a rule you were given young by somebody who meant well is not a fault. It is what a girl on a hard chair does.

I am saying I know what the rule is and where you got it. That is all.

Shewed before Him

Here is a psalm where a man does the exact thing that rule forbids, and he does it deliberately and he writes it down.

I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble.Psalm 142:2

Two verbs, and both of them are about putting something outside yourself.

Poured out. That is a vessel being emptied, not a portion being handed over.

Shewed. Showed. Displayed. Held up where it could be seen. The word is not about informing God, who already knew. It is about the act of putting the thing out in the open on purpose.

And the word for what he shews is my trouble. Not my faith. Not my resolution. The trouble itself, held up.

That psalm is in the book. Somebody could have left it out. It got kept, and it gets read out loud in public, and it has been read out loud in rooms with twelve year olds on hard chairs in them for a very long time.

So let me turn and speak straight at you, in your kitchen with the window open.

You are permitted to shew it before Him. Not one day, not once the doubt resolves, not when you have got it into a shape that seems safe to voice. Right now, on a warm evening with music coming from the next room, you are being invited to do what David did on purpose and wrote down afterwards. That is not my reassurance. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and lays it on a real woman in a real kitchen.

Now, the rule.

I am going to answer it plainly, because thirty five years is long enough.

Speaking a doubt to God is not feeding it. It is the opposite operation. What you speak to a person you keep it from grows in the dark, because there is nowhere else for it to go. What you shew before Him is out of you and in the open and in the hands of somebody who is not startled by it.

The rule was aimed at something real. Talking yourself into a hole is a genuine thing and that person had watched it happen. But they gave a twelve year old a rule with no exception in it, and the exception is the whole of Psalm 142.

And hear this, because it is settled and not still open. You have permission to pour it out, and the permission is written into the psalms by somebody who exercised it. The word says I shewed before him my trouble, and shewing is a deliberate act rather than a lapse, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real house on a real evening.

Say it out loud. Not to feed it. To get it out of the dark where it has been growing for thirty five years.