Three Days Before I Tell Anyone

The good thing happened on a Thursday and you have not told a single person.

Not your mother, who would want to know first and would be hurt later that she did not. Not your sister, who tells you everything within four minutes of it happening. Nobody at work.

You have carried it around for two days now like something in a coat pocket that you keep checking is still there.

And you will tell them. On Sunday, probably, or Monday, once it has held for three days.

Three is the number. You could not tell anybody where the number came from and it has never been written down anywhere, but it is three, and it has been three for years, and everybody in your family has noticed that you are always the last one to say anything and none of them have worked out why.

The reason is very simple and it is not superstition.

If you say it out loud and then it gets taken back, you have to tell everybody twice. Once with your face doing the good thing and once with your face doing the other one.

And you have done that. You know exactly what the second conversation is like, and how they look at you, and how you end up comforting them.

So now you wait three days.

Before we go any further, hear me.

I am not telling you off.

There is nothing shameful in this. It is not ingratitude and it is not a lack of faith. It is a man who has had to make the second phone call before and has quietly arranged his life so that he never has to make it again.

I am saying I know what is in your coat pocket. That is all.

The land of the living

Here is a line David breaks off in the middle of, and the breaking off is the point.

I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.Psalm 27:13

Read it as it stands, because most translations tidy it and the tidying costs something. The sentence does not finish. He says I had fainted, unless, and then he does not tell you what he would have done. He leaves the sentence open because he cannot bear to complete it.

That is a man writing from exactly this position. That is not a man writing from a good week.

And what holds him up is a phrase he chooses very deliberately. Not the goodness of the LORD in heaven. Not the goodness of the LORD eventually. In the land of the living, which means here, in this life, in the ordinary world where things also go wrong.

So let me turn and speak straight at you, with the good thing still in your pocket.

You are permitted to be glad now. Not one day, not after three days have elapsed, not once it is safe. Right now, on the second day with nobody told, you are in the land of the living and so is the goodness, and the verse puts them in the same place on purpose. That is not my opinion. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and lays it on a real man in a real week.

Now, here is what I am not going to do.

I am not going to tell you that the thing will hold. I do not know whether it will hold. Nobody writing anything anywhere knows whether it will hold, and if I told you it would and it did not, I would have done to you exactly what has already been done to you.

What I will say is this: the three days do not protect you.

That is the thing worth looking at. You believe the quarantine is doing something, and I understand why it feels like it is, but it is not. If it gets taken back on Saturday you will feel it the same on Saturday whether or not anybody knew. All the three days actually do is take the gladness out of Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and hand you the loss anyway if it comes.

The insurance never pays out. It only takes the payments.

And hear this, because it is settled and not still open. You are held on Saturday whichever way Saturday goes, and the holding does not depend on how the good thing turns out. The word says the goodness of the LORD is in the land of the living, which is a promise about where He works rather than a guarantee about your Thursday, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real chest in a real week.

You can be glad today and still be held if it goes. Those two have never once been in competition.