The Message You Have Deleted Every Time

The message is seven words long and she has written it more times than she would be willing to say out loud.

I think I might be done.

Sometimes it is that. Sometimes it starts with a bit of throat clearing first, hope you are well, sorry to land this on you, and then the seven words further down where they are easier to send.

She always writes it to the same person. A friend from years back, two hundred miles away, nothing to do with any of this, somebody who would not have to do anything about it and would not tell anyone. She has chosen exactly right. That is the correct person and she knew it the first time.

And she deletes it. Every time. Sometimes after four minutes, sometimes after twenty. Once she got as far as the send button being under her thumb and put the phone face down on the arm of the chair as though it had gone hot.

That has been going on since about March.

And here is what has changed lately, and it is the reason she is reading this instead of sleeping.

It has stopped being about whether she is done. It has become about the deleting.

Because the friend rang last month and asked how things were, warmly and properly, and she said good, busy, you know how it is. And she heard herself say it. And she thought: I have now said that to the only person I chose to tell, out loud, on the phone, after typing it out eleven times.

So now there are two things sitting in her chest instead of one. There is the tiredness. And underneath it now there is a quiet suspicion that she has become a person who cannot tell the truth about herself to anybody alive.

Now that is you with the phone face down, and you have known it was you since the second line.

Nothing here is going to be argued at you

Let me tell you what is not about to happen on this page, because you have braced yourself for both of them.

Nobody here is going to talk you into staying. Not with encouragement, not with guilt, not with a story about somebody who nearly walked away and is glad now. And nobody here is going to tell you to go, because that is not mine to hand you, I do not know your years or your people, and both of those are only different ways of making an exhausted person carry a decision tonight.

There is no decision on this page. Set it down for twenty minutes. It will keep. It has kept since March.

There is nothing to do here either. No practice to build, nothing to get up earlier for, no discipline to add. You are running on empty, and a suggestion is the last thing empty needs.

And I am not going to tell you to send the message. That is yours, and you will know, and a page cannot know.

What I want is to take one specific weight off you, and it is this one: the belief that a person who deletes it eleven times is a person with something dishonest at the center of her.

So look at a letter that a man actually put in the post.

He was the most publicly capable person of his generation in that work. He had planted, taught, argued, been beaten, been shipwrecked. And he wrote this to a church he was responsible for, knowing that they would read it out loud to each other, which is a far more exposed thing than a message to one friend two hundred miles away:

For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.2 Corinthians 1:8

Read what he does there. He does not tidy it. He does not say it was a difficult season and God was faithful. He says beyond our strength, and he says despaired of life itself, and he says it in writing, to people who looked up to him.

And then he says the reason he is telling them: that we would not rely on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.

God did not require an apostle to keep his worst months to himself, and He is not requiring it of you. He had the letter written, sent, kept and read out to the whole church, and it is in your Bible tonight (2 Corinthians 1:8). It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes a sentence written by a man at the end of himself and lays it beside a phone face down on a chair.

Now the deleting, and I want to be careful and kind about it, because you have been very hard on yourself for it.

You have not been lying. You have been protecting.

Every time your thumb has come off that button, it has come off for a reason that is decent: they would worry, they would ring my husband, they would feel they had to do something, it would change how they see me, they have their own weight. Those are not the instincts of a dishonest person. They are the instincts of somebody who has spent years absorbing things so that other people would not have to carry them, and you cannot switch that off at eleven o'clock at night just because it is now your turn.

Being unable to hand somebody your own weight is not deceit, it is what happens to a person who has carried everybody else's for years without ever once putting theirs down. It is written that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and remembers there is tender, not disappointed. His Spirit is what turns that from a nice line into a hand on somebody's shoulder in a dark front room.

And there is one more thing about that letter, and it is the part that matters most tonight.

Paul did not write it while he was at the end of himself. He wrote it afterwards, looking back, and he could only write it because he had lived through it. Which means there were weeks in Asia when the most honest man in the New Testament was in exactly the place you are in, and had not told anybody yet either.

God is not standing over you with a stopwatch on your honesty, and He has never once made His nearness conditional on you being able to say it out loud. It is written that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18), and there is no clause in that verse about having told somebody first. The Holy Spirit is the one who is in a room where nothing has been said yet.

And I need to say this plainly, because it matters more than anything else here. If any of this has traveled past tiredness, if you have found yourself thinking that everyone would manage better without you in the world at all, please tell a human being tonight, and let that be the message you do not delete. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line or emergency number, and one person who knows your name and will stay with you. Being the one who always listens does not disqualify you from being the one who speaks.

The verdict you have been passing on yourself since that phone call has no standing, and heaven has never once read it out. It is written that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and the word in it is now, not later and not once you have managed to send something. The Holy Spirit is the one who reads that over a woman in a window seat with a blanket over her knees.