You Have Said Fine So Often You Cannot Tell

The word is fine, and she has said it so many times that it has come loose from its meaning, the way a word does if you repeat it in a room by yourself.

She said it eleven times last Sunday. She was not counting on purpose; she noticed it around the fifth and then could not stop noticing. How are you, Pastor. Fine. You must be tired. Fine, honestly. Are you all right, you look pale. Fine, it is the light in here.

None of those were lies exactly. That is the difficulty. They were the only available answer at the speed the question was traveling. Somebody asks you in a doorway on the way past with a cup in their hand and a coat over their arm, and there is a shape the answer has to be, and the shape is one word, and the word is fine.

Here is what she noticed on the drive home, and it is the thing that has bothered her since.

Somebody asked her at about half past twelve, a woman she likes, and it was a proper asking. She had stopped walking. She had put the cup down. She said, and Eliana, how are you actually.

And she said fine.

Not out of guardedness. She has thought about this a great deal and she is sure. It was not that she chose to keep it back. It was that the word came out on its own, in under a second, from somewhere lower than deciding, before any part of her had gone and looked.

And then she stood there with a strange sensation, which was this: she could not tell you whether it was true. She genuinely did not know. Somebody had opened a door and she had walked past it out of pure habit, and when she went back in her mind to see what was actually in the room, she could not find the light switch.

That is where she lives now. Not unhappy. Not in crisis. Just a woman who has answered a question the same way for so many years that the answering has replaced the knowing, and who sat in a car outside her own house at ten to one on a Sunday trying to work out how she was, and got nowhere at all.

He was never waiting on your report

There is a verse in the thirty eighth psalm that I want to put in your hand plainly, because it does something that almost nothing else does. It takes the reporting off you.

Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee.Psalm 38:9

Read it slowly. It does not say I have told Him. It does not say I brought it to Him in an orderly way. It says the groaning is not hid, which is a thing that is true about it whether or not the man in the psalm ever manages to put it into words.

That is a plain sentence and I am not going to dress it up. God is not standing at the other end of your day waiting for an accurate summary before He can move. He has read the room already, and He read it before you got in the car.

So hear this over you, and hear it in a plain voice: you are fully known this morning, and you did not have to produce it. That is not my consolation. It is what His word says about a groaning that has never once been hidden, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes a verse like that arrive in a woman as relief instead of doctrine.

Now look at what that does to the doorway.

You have been carrying a quiet fear that the habit is a form of dishonesty. That every fine is a small untruth and that they have added up over eleven years into a person who cannot locate herself. And the fear has a sting in it, because you are somebody who cares a great deal about being truthful. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that true in a person rather than merely accurate on a page.

But here is what is actually true. The word came out because you have been answering a question that was rarely a question, at a speed that had no room in it, and a mouth learns that the way hands learn a lid. That is not deceit. That is wear. There is a difference between a woman who hides and a woman who has been worn smooth in one particular spot, and God has never confused the two.

And you are not required to reconstruct yourself before you are welcome here. His word says the desire is already before Him, in the present tense, all of it, including the parts you cannot find this morning, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting outside a locked room while a tired woman hunts for a light switch.

I want to say one more plain thing, and then I will stop, because you are worn out and this is not the place for a long list.

Not knowing how you are is not the same as being far from God. Those two got welded together somewhere and it happened without you agreeing to it. The psalmist did not know how he was either; that whole psalm is a man rummaging around in himself and coming up with contradictory handfuls. And in the middle of the rummaging he says the one steady thing available, which is that the mess is not hidden.

You are held today exactly as you are, un-summarized, with the honest answer still missing. Scripture says the groaning is not hid from Him and it puts no condition on the wording, and the Holy Spirit has been reading a woman who could not read herself, every Sunday, for years.

Let me say this plainly too, because it belongs here. If the flatness has gone somewhere darker recently, if there have been thoughts in that car outside your own house that you would not repeat to anybody, please do not sit with that alone today. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one real person, today. That is not a failure of ministry. That is the honest answer finally getting a room to be said in, and God is the one who put people in the world to sit in it.