They Explained It To Everybody But You

She has four fragments and she has been trying to make a reason out of them since August, which is a thing she would tell anybody else to stop doing.

The first came from a woman outside the hardware store who said something and then said, well, you will have heard all this. She had not heard any of it.

The second was a sentence somebody's teenager said in a car, cheerfully, about there having been a thing.

The third was that a family she has known for years suddenly became careful around her in a specific way. Nothing you could point at. Just that particular gentleness people use when they know something.

The fourth was worst, and it was that somebody said sorry to her. In the street, apropos of nothing, in a tone that made it clear they were sorry about something specific, and then changed the subject before she could ask.

So there is a reason. There is definitely a reason, and it exists in about eleven households in that town, in a form she has never been given.

She is not owed an explanation. She wants that said, because she has thought about it a great deal at two in the morning and she is clear on it. Nobody owes a pastor a reason for their own decision about their own family, and if that family did not want to have the conversation, that is theirs to decide, and she would defend their right to it.

But here is what it does to a person, and this is the part nobody sees.

She now runs a small permanent process in the back of her mind. Every conversation in that town has a second layer running underneath it: does this one know. She catches herself scanning for it. And because she cannot ask anybody without turning it into a thing, she is assembling a story out of fragments, and the story she assembles at two in the morning is always the worst available version, because that is what a mind does with gaps.

And the loneliest part is not being talked about. It is being the only person in the room who does not know what the room knows.

The psalm that says it plainly

There is a psalm with a heading on it that tells you the room it was written in: a prayer when he was in the cave. And in the middle of it there is a sentence that most people are too polite to say out loud.

I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul.Psalm 142:4

That is not a balanced statement. It is not fair to everybody involved. It is a man in a hole in the ground saying the thing that is true of how it feels, in front of God, without dressing it up first.

And God kept it. It is in the book. Nobody edited it into something more generous.

So hear this, walking up a main street with a second layer running: you are allowed to say it as badly as it feels. That is not my permission; it is what His word preserved from a cave without correcting it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a psalm that plain and makes it usable to a woman who has been careful for six months.

Now let me say the plain thing about the family, and I am going to be as fair as I can, because you have been fair and you deserve fairness back.

People who cannot face a conversation talk to the people who are easy to talk to. That is nearly always what this is. It is not a campaign, and it is very rarely malice. Explaining yourself to a friend over a cup of tea costs almost nothing; explaining yourself to the person you are leaving costs a great deal, and so the cheap conversations happen and the expensive one does not, and after a fortnight the expensive one becomes impossible.

That produces exactly what you are living in, and it is not a message about you. It is what happens when a difficult sentence gets postponed.

You have not been judged by eleven households. Scripture never once asks anybody to build a verdict out of fragments, and the Holy Spirit is not the one supplying the worst available version at two in the morning.

Now here is the verse after the plain one, and it is the one to stand on.

I cried unto thee, O LORD: I said, Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the living.

Portion. It is a land word. When Israel divided the country, every tribe got a portion except one, and the priests were told the Lord Himself was their portion instead. It is the word for what a person actually has and can count on.

So the man in the cave, who has just said no man cared for my soul, turns and names what he still has. Not a hope for later. A portion, present tense, in the land of the living, which is this world and this town and this week.

You have a portion. Not a consolation for the information you do not have. His word puts refuge and portion in the mouth of a man who has just said the loneliest sentence in the psalter, and the Holy Spirit has been that portion in a woman all through a summer of careful conversations.