I Said It Once And It Went Badly

Dale said it in a kitchen in 2016 and he has not said anything since.

He had it right. That is the part that has made the nine years complicated rather than simple. What he had was accurate, and it was confirmed within about four months, and the man he said it to has never disputed the substance of it.

What Dale got wrong was everything else.

He said it standing up. He said it with somebody else in the doorway. He said it at the end of an evening when the man was tired, and he said it in a form of words that came out as an announcement rather than as a question, and he said it with a certainty in his voice that he did not entirely feel.

The man's face did something Dale has not forgotten, and then the man was polite, and then Dale went home.

They are still on speaking terms. They see each other. It is fine and it is not fine, and it will never be quite what it was, and Dale knows that is not because he was wrong. It is because of how a man feels when somebody stands up in his kitchen and tells him something about his own life at the end of a long day.

Nine years.

He is fifty-eight and he has had things since. Two or three, and one of them recently. And every time, what arrives with it now is not wonder. It is the kitchen.

You may know that kitchen.

Maybe you also got it right and got it wrong. Maybe you have a face you have not forgotten. And maybe the thing that stops you now is not doubt about whether these things are real, but a very specific memory of what your own voice sounded like.

The word is fitly

There is a line in Proverbs about words that people usually read as being about eloquence, and it is not.

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.Proverbs 25:11

Fitly. The sense is fitted: suited to its occasion, sized to the moment, right for the setting it goes into.

It is not a word about the content being true. A true word can be spoken unfitly, and that is exactly what happened in 2016, and it is why you cannot resolve the nine years by reminding yourself that you were accurate. Accuracy was never the thing that failed.

And the image is doing work too. Apples of gold in pictures of silver: something set into something. The setting is part of the thing. The same object, badly set, is not the same gift.

Which means the lesson available to you from that kitchen is not do not speak. It is a lesson about setting, and you learned it the way most people learn about setting, which is by getting one wrong in front of somebody you liked.

And what you had was right and it was the setting that failed. The written word makes fitness a property of the occasion rather than of the content, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that separation hold in a man who has been carrying one word for nine years.

And you are not being asked to doubt what you were given. The word never once tells the speaker the apples were not gold, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than reopening the substance.

Nine years is not repentance

Let me say something honest now, and it is not a rebuke.

The nine years have not been about protecting anybody.

That is what they look like from outside and it is even what they feel like from inside. But a man who had genuinely learned about setting would speak differently, not stop. Nine years of total silence is not a corrected aim. It is a man who has decided that the safest volume is zero because he cannot trust himself with any other.

Which is understandable, and which has cost two or three people since 2016 something you were carrying for them.

I am not going to tell you to go and speak to anybody. That is not mine to say and it is not what this is.

And you are able to hold something and speak it fitly, and those are the same skill practiced. The word says a word spoken in due season, how good is it, and it locates the goodness in the timing, and the Spirit is the one who supplies a sense of season that no amount of resolving to be careful produces.

And nothing about you is under review for 2016. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who still remembers what his own voice sounded like.

The other thing that happened in that kitchen

One more, and it is the part nobody would have told you.

You said it with a certainty you did not entirely feel.

That is worth looking at, because it is the only bit of that evening that was actually yours to control, and I do not think it was dishonesty. I think a man who is frightened of not being believed puts extra weight on his voice, and the extra weight is what turned a question into an announcement.

Which means the fix is not more caution. It is less pressure. The thing did not need your certainty behind it. It could have gone into that kitchen as a question and survived being wrong.

That is what shown to nobody today is for, incidentally. Not secrecy. It lowers the cost of being wrong, and a man who can afford to be wrong does not have to push.

And you are not required to guarantee what you carry. The word says we know in part, and we prophesy in part, and it says it about everybody, and the Spirit is the one who makes partial knowing bearable enough to speak from.