Only The Ones Who Say It My Way

She can tell in about four seconds.

Somebody starts talking about God and she is listening to the content for maybe half of the first sentence, and after that she is listening to something else entirely, and she has never once admitted this to anybody.

She is listening for the words.

There is a set of them. She could not write the list down if you asked her, because it is not a list, it is a sound. A particular way of saying it that she grew up inside. And when somebody uses those words she settles, and something in her says this one is real, and she relaxes and starts actually listening.

And when they do not, she does not switch off exactly. She is not rude and she would be mortified if you said she was. But a small door closes and everything after that comes to her through it.

She has been doing this since she was about fifteen. Twenty-six years.

She found it out at a funeral, of all places, listening to a man speak about her own aunt in a vocabulary she had spent her whole life filing under polite and empty, and hearing, halfway through, that he plainly knew God better than she did.

Now let me put her down and ask you the question, and answer it in your own head where nobody can hear.

Whose words do you need to hear before you can believe somebody means it?

The psalm does not say they will all sound the same

There is a line in the middle of the darkest psalm in the book, and it arrives out of nowhere.

Psalm 22 is the one that opens with my God, my God, why have You forsaken me. It is the psalm Jesus said out loud from the cross. It is not a comfortable place and nothing about it is tidy.

And then, most of the way down, without any warning, the thing opens out.

All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before Him, for dominion belongs to the Lord and He rules over the nations.Psalm 22:27 and 28

All the families of the nations.

Beloved, you are inside a promise in Psalm 22 that is deliberately larger than any one household's way of speaking, and the Spirit who carried that line into the middle of a lament is the same Spirit at work in mouths that do not sound like yours.

Now read what it does not say, because that is where this lands.

It does not say they will all use the same words. It says they will remember, and they will turn, and they will bow. Three verbs, and not one of them is about vocabulary.

That matters more than it looks. Families of nations do not share a language. That is what makes them families of nations. The psalm is picturing an enormous number of people doing the same thing in an enormous number of tongues, and God is not standing there checking phrasing.

And here is what I want to say to you with my whole chest, gently, because I know how this one goes.

You are not shallow for having a sound you trust. Every one of us has one. Psalm 22 says all the families of the nations will bow down before him, and the Spirit put families in the plural on purpose. It is where you were loved and it is where you first heard the name, and there is nothing wrong with a heart that settles when it hears home.

The trouble is what the sound has started doing. It has stopped being where you are from and started being how you check.

The word says all the ends of the earth will remember and turn, and the Spirit has been in rooms this week doing exactly that in words you would have filed under polite and empty, and you would not have heard a thing.