He Said It In Front Of Everybody

She has a theory and she has never tested it.

The theory is that saying a thing out loud makes it bigger.

She would not put it in those words. If you asked her why she has not told anybody, she would give you reasons about not burdening people and about it being in the past and about there being nothing anybody could do.

Those are all true and none of them is the theory.

The theory is underneath, and it goes like this: at the moment it exists only in her, it is contained. It is the size of one person. And the second it goes into the air, it becomes a thing in the world, with a shape, that somebody else knows about, and then it is permanent in a way it currently is not.

So she keeps it small by keeping it in.

And she is thirty-eight now, and she has been running that theory since she was about twenty-two, and it has one problem which she has recently begun to notice.

It has not stayed small.

Sixteen years in one person is not containment. It has had a room to itself for sixteen years and it has used the space.

So let me ask you.

What are you afraid saying it out loud would do to it?

He said it in the worst possible room

There is a scene in Luke set at a dinner party, which is the least private place in the story, and a woman comes in who everybody there has an opinion about.

The whole room is thinking the same thing about her and one of them says it, and Jesus answers him with a story about two debtors, which is not the part I want.

The part I want is what He says next, and who hears it.

Then Jesus said to her, Your sins are forgiven.Luke 7:48

Out loud. In that room. In front of the host who had just been thinking what he was thinking, and in front of everybody reclining at that table.

Luke 7 has the pardon spoken aloud in the least private room available, and the Spirit was in the saying rather than in any discretion about it, so putting a thing into the air has never once been what makes it permanent. You are not making anything permanent by saying it.

And watch what happens to the size of it.

Before He speaks, that woman is a subject the room is thinking about. She is a reputation, and she is being handled, silently, by everybody present.

After He speaks, she is a person who has been forgiven, and the room has been told so, and there is nothing left for anybody to be privately deciding about her.

The saying did not enlarge it. The saying finished it.

Now, gently, because this is a fear and not an argument, and you cannot reason somebody out of a fear by being clever at them.

I am not telling you to announce anything to a room. Nothing here asks that of you, and nothing here requires a particular person or a particular arrangement, in any direction. A dinner party is not the prescription.

I am telling you your theory has a testable claim in it, and sixteen years of data.

Luke 7 shows a thing spoken out loud getting smaller in the same moment, and the Spirit has never treated silence as a way of keeping anything contained, which means the room you gave it has been the thing feeding it. You have been housing it, and you are the one who can stop.