I Can Say It to Them

You said it to him on the wall on Tuesday and it was the right thing.

He had been up all night with it and he could not see any way through, and you sat there for about forty minutes mostly saying nothing, and then you said one sentence about God not having gone anywhere, and something in his face changed.

You did not construct it. It came out because it is true and because you believe it, and you have said versions of it to about a dozen people over the years, and it has landed almost every time.

That is a real gift and everybody who knows you would say so.

Now here is what happened on the way home.

You had a bad hour yourself, about something entirely different, and the sentence you had said to him did not exist. Not disbelieved; unavailable. It was not in the room. It was a thing you say to other people and there is no version of it that runs the other way.

You have been like this for years and it has never troubled you until recently, because it has never looked like a problem. A man who comforts people well is not a man with an obvious deficiency.

But there is a valve, and it only opens one way.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you the comforting was insincere. It was not, and suggesting it would be both untrue and cruel, and it would take from a dozen people something that genuinely helped them.

I am not going to tell you to stop doing it. There is a version of this conversation where somebody is told to withdraw and look after themselves first, and the man goes quiet, and a dozen people lose the one person who says the true thing on a wall.

And I am not going to tell you it is pride. It is not pride, or not mostly; it is much older and much less flattering than that.

What I am going to do is open the valve, which is one action and can be done today.

You are not excluded from what you hand out. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it does not exempt the man who says it to everybody else, and the Holy Spirit is on that wall after everybody has gone.

The verse has a word for receiving in it

There is a line in 1 John that most people quote from the second half and which does its real work in the first.

And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.1 John 4:16

We have known and believed the love that God hath to us.

Two verbs, and they are pointed inward. Known, and believed, and the object of both is the love that God hath to us.

That is not a doctrine about God's nature in general. It is a statement that a particular love, directed at particular people, has been received by them, and John includes himself in the we.

He does not say we have proclaimed the love. He does not say we have carried the love to others, though he had spent sixty years doing exactly that.

He says received.

That is the sentence you have never been able to say. You could preach the second half of that verse on a wall to a man in trouble, beautifully. You have never once said the first half about yourself.

You are not outside the we in that sentence. Scripture says we have known and believed the love that God hath to us, 1 John 4:16, and it is written by a man who spent his life handing it out and still put himself inside the receiving clause, and the Holy Spirit is the one who opens a valve that has run one way for years.

Where the valve came from

It is worth knowing, because it will stop you treating it as a character flaw.

Somewhere early, you learned that your place in a room is at the giving end. There will be a reason for that; there usually is, and it is usually somebody in a house who needed a lot and a child who worked out how to be the one who was fine.

That child became extremely good at reading a room and saying the thing. It is why you are useful on a harbor wall at forty. Scripture already said it in 1 John 4:16, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

And it came with an unexamined rule: I am the one who has it, not the one who needs it.

That rule has never been said out loud, which is why it has never been tested. And because comforting people is genuinely good, the rule has been rewarded for thirty years, which is why it has never had to change.

You are not defective for being on the giving end. Scripture says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust, Psalm 103:14, and it is offered as the ground of His tenderness rather than as an assessment of a man's usefulness, and the Holy Spirit has never once agreed with a rule that a child made in a difficult house.

What opening it looks like

It is one action and it is embarrassing.

Say to yourself, out loud, in the second person, the sentence you said to him on Tuesday.

Not adapted. Not softened into something more defensible. The same sentence, said to you, by you, out loud, in a room with nobody in it.

It will feel absurd, and it will feel like a man of your age doing something faintly ridiculous, and about four words in something will go tight in your chest.

That tightness is the valve. It has been shut a long time and it has muscle on it.

Do it anyway, and do it again tomorrow, and notice that you are not asking anybody for anything and nobody is being burdened and nothing is being taken from the dozen people who need you on walls.

You are not required to stay at the giving end to be safe. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and one another is reciprocal by construction, and the Holy Spirit is not asking anybody to be permanently one half of a two-way arrangement.