He has carried it for six years and he could tell you exactly where he keeps it.
That is not a figure of speech. Ask him and he will put his hand on the place, halfway up the left side of his back, between the shoulder blade and the spine.
He has been to somebody about it twice. The first time he was told it was posture and the second time he was told it was stress, and neither of them was wrong, and neither of them was it.
He knows what it is.
There is a thing he did, six years ago, which is not enormous by the standards of what people do and which has never been found out. Nobody is looking for it. There is no consequence coming and there never was.
And he has never said it out loud. Not to God, exactly, in the sense of naming it plainly rather than referring to it sideways. Not to his wife. Not to the man he has known since school.
Six years of holding a thing with a set of muscles that were not designed for it.
He is not tormented. That is what makes it survivable and it is also what has let it go on so long. It is a low, constant, entirely bearable weight, and he has organized his life around carrying it, and the organizing has become who he is.
So let me ask you.
Where in your body have you been keeping it?
He describes it as a physical condition
There is a psalm about being forgiven, and the strange thing about it is how much of it is about the time before.
David spends the opening on the relief, and then he goes back and describes what the silence was actually like, and he does it in the language of a body rather than a conscience.
When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.Psalm 32:3 and 4
Bones. Groaning. Strength. Heat.
Psalm 32 puts the cost of silence in the skeleton rather than in the feelings, and the Spirit who inspired it did not treat that as weakness or exaggeration, so what your back has been doing for six years has never been separate from what you have not said.
And then comes the turn, and it is one sentence, and I want you to see how fast it moves.
Then I acknowledged my sin to You and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. And You forgave the guilt of my sin.
He says I said. The saying is in the verse. It is not a change of mind that gets recorded, it is a speaking.
Now let me be careful, my friend, in the way this house is always careful.
I am not going to tell you who you must say it to. Nothing here requires a particular person, a particular room, or any arrangement anybody has ever argued about. Not one word of this asks that of you, in any direction, and I would not.
What I am telling you is that the psalm treats saying as an event with a before and an after, and the before has symptoms.
Psalm 32 records a man's bones recovering after his mouth moved, and the Spirit was in the speaking as much as in the pardon, which means six years of holding it has been costing you something real rather than something imagined.
You have not been strong. You have been quiet, and your back has been keeping the account.
Now the move, and it costs nine seconds.
Say it plainly, once, out loud.
Not sideways. Not in the careful language you have built over six years, where it is that business or what happened or a pronoun with no noun attached to it. The actual words.
You are not required to say it to a person. Hear that clearly, because it matters and because a reader with nobody safe is not being left outside this. One trusted person, if you have one. The empty room, if you do not. Both count and neither is the lesser version.
Psalm 32 has the bones wasting in the silence and the guilt lifting after a man's mouth moved, and the Spirit was in both halves of that, so putting it into the air has never been a weakness or a technique.
Six years in your back. Nine seconds in the air.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Silence, you are a habit of six years and you were never strength. Psalm 32 puts the cost of you in the bones and the groaning and the sapped strength, and it does not call any of that exaggeration.
- Careful language I built so I could refer to it without naming it, you have kept a thing unnamed even in my own head, and in the name of Jesus you are finished. The Spirit was in the speaking as much as in the pardon, and He has never asked me to be oblique.
- Lord, Psalm 32 says I said, and then it says You forgave, and the saying is written into the verse. I am putting nine seconds of plain words into the air tonight, and my back has been keeping the account long enough.
Psalm 32:3
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