Said Out Loud, And Answered

Tomas has said it a hundred times.

Not roughly a hundred. He has a number, because he is that sort of man, and the number lives in the same place the thing itself lives, which is the four inches behind his own eyes where nobody has ever been.

It goes like this. The house sleeps. He does not. He lies there and he takes it out and he says it to God, silently, precisely, in full sentences, because he was taught to be exact and he has never seen a reason to stop. He names it. He names who it touched. He says the word sorry and he means it so hard his jaw aches.

Then he waits.

And into that waiting comes the same nothing that came the other ninety nine times. Not a cold nothing. Not an angry nothing. Just the ceiling, and the boiler clicking off, and his own breathing, and the enormous silence of a conversation held entirely inside one skull.

Four years of that.

He is not a fool. He knows what he believes. He could tell you, correctly, chapter and verse, that God forgives, and if you asked him whether he was forgiven he would say yes, and he would mean it, and he would go on lying awake anyway. Because there is a distance between the thing you know and the thing you have heard, and no amount of knowing has ever once crossed it for him at half past one in the morning.

Then, on a Saturday, he is mending a fence with his brother in law.

It is not a spiritual afternoon. There is a bag of tools open on the grass and a panel that will not sit straight and the two of them have been swearing gently at a post for forty minutes. And Tomas is holding the panel while the other man works the pliers, and out of absolutely nowhere, with no run up, in the middle of a sentence about brackets, he says it.

Out loud. In a garden. In daylight. The whole thing, in about eleven words, to another human being.

And the pliers stop.

He gave you ears on purpose

I want to say something to you that nobody has ever said to Tomas, and I have a feeling nobody has said it to you either.

Needing to hear it is not weakness.

You have quietly filed it as weakness. You have assumed that a stronger believer would be satisfied with the transaction God has already completed, and that the reason you are still lying there at half past one is that your faith is thin. That is not what is going on. What is going on is that you are a human being, and human beings are made with ears, and God made them, and He has never once been irritated by the way He built us. James 5 says confess to one another and pray for one another, and the Spirit put another person's ears into the instruction itself, so the wanting to hear it was never weakness.

Look at what the letter of James actually says, because it is more ordinary than you think and much better.

Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.James 5:16

To one another. Out loud, to somebody with a face. And notice what it is for: so that you may be healed. Not so that the paperwork goes through. The forgiving is God's and it was settled at the cross and it does not wait on anybody's ears. But the healing, the part where a man stops lying awake at half past one, has a spoken shape to it, and Scripture is completely unembarrassed about saying so.

And then the other half, which is the ground the whole thing stands on.

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.1 John 1:9

Faithful and just. Not moved. Not persuaded. Faithful, which means He does it because it is what He is like, and just, which means it is not even a favor, because the price was paid and the account is not in dispute. That is why the answer can be said out loud by anybody at all without becoming a lie in their mouth. They are not granting anything. They are reading you the verdict.

Now hear the wide part of this, because this is the door that has never shut.

If your tradition puts a person in front of you whose whole calling is to say it back to you with authority, that is a gift, and I would not take it off you for anything. Use it. If your tradition does not, the New Testament has already handed you something enormous: one another. A friend. A sister. A brother in law with a pair of pliers in his hand.

And if tonight there is nobody, and for some of you reading this at this hour there genuinely is nobody, then the empty room will do, because the One who answers is not deaf in an empty room and never has been. Say it where your own ears can catch it. Then read His answer out loud from the page, in your own voice, and understand what you are doing: you are not comforting yourself. You are reading out a sentence He wrote, and it does not become less His because your mouth is the one saying it. James 5 puts the confessing and the praying in a single verse, and the Spirit is not deaf in an empty room, so what you are hearing is His and not your own comfort.

This was never a members' door. It is a wide one, in a house that has fed whoever turned up for a very long time, and nobody stands at it checking whether you belong here before you speak.