I Switch At The Forty Second Mark

Camille noticed the timing about five weeks ago and has not been able to unnotice it.

She prays about her marriage most evenings. She starts in English, because that is how she starts, and she gets somewhere between thirty and fifty seconds in, and then she switches.

That is not the part that troubles her. She has done this for twenty years and the switching is ordinary and she is not going to apologize for it.

What troubles her is where the switch falls.

It falls, every single time, at the exact point where the next sentence would have to be the honest one. She gets right up to the edge of I do not think I like him anymore and the language changes and she is praying past it, in something she cannot audit, warmly and at length, and it feels like prayer because it is prayer.

And then she gets up, and she has prayed for twenty-five minutes, and the sentence is still sitting there unsaid, exactly where it was.

She is thirty-nine. She has done this, she now suspects, for about two years.

The thing is real. That is what makes it hard. If it were fake she could stop it. But it is the same thing she has had since she was nineteen and it has carried her through worse than this, and she is not going to accuse it of anything.

She has just noticed that it has, without anybody deciding, become the place she goes at the forty second mark.

You may know that mark.

Maybe you also have a real thing that has quietly acquired a second job. Maybe you have noticed the timing. And maybe you have not been able to say that to anyone either, which is rather the point.

What the silence was costing him

There is a psalm about an unsaid sentence and it does not describe the cost in spiritual terms. It describes it in the body.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.Psalm 32:3

Read the two halves together, because they look like a contradiction and they are not.

When I kept silence. And then, in the same line, my roaring all the day long.

He was not quiet. He was making a great deal of noise. The roaring is going on continuously and it is going on the whole time the silence is going on, and the psalm sets them side by side without any sense that this needs explaining.

Because a man can be extremely loud about everything except the one thing. And the noise is not a cover story he invented; it is simply what a person does with a mouth that is not saying the sentence.

And the cost he reports is physical. Bones. Wearing out. Not guilt, not distance, not a spiritual category at all: something got old in him while the sentence stayed down.

Which means the roaring and the silence living together in one person is a described condition and not a hypocrisy, and the psalmist writes it about himself and then keeps going.

And you are a person with an unsaid sentence rather than a person who has been faking. The written word puts silence and roaring in the same line and never once reconciles them, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a woman who has been up to the edge of one sentence for two years.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word says the Spirit itself maketh intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, and the Spirit is the one carrying that rather than requiring you to have found the sentence first.

The thing did not do this

Now let me be precise, because you are close to accusing something that carried you at nineteen and it does not deserve it.

The gift did not develop a habit. Gifts do not do that. It has no opinion about your marriage and no interest in your timing and it did not go looking for a job.

What happened is much more ordinary. There is a sentence that costs something to say. There was an exit available at the exact moment the cost arrives. And you took it once, in a hard week, without deciding anything, and then took it again, and after about two years the taking of it is what the forty second mark is for.

Nobody built that. It assembled itself out of a real thing and a real reluctance, the way almost everything in a life assembles itself, and there is no moment in it that you could go back and be blamed for.

And the timing is a worn path rather than a verdict on you. The word says He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust, and the Spirit is the one who makes that cover two years of taking the nearest exit.

And nothing about you is under review for the forty second mark. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who noticed her own timing five weeks ago and has been carrying it alone since.

And nobody is taking it off you

Let me say the thing you are braced for, so it stops taking up room.

Nothing here says stop. Nothing here says the switching is avoidance in general, or that praying this way is a lesser prayer, or that a person who prays this way about a hard thing is dodging it. Most of the time it is the opposite and you know that from twenty years of evidence.

And nothing here says you must have this, or that somebody without it is missing anything, or that having it says one word about where anybody stands, because the chapter that lists these asks do all speak with tongues in a form that expects the answer no. And nothing here settles what belongs in a gathering, which is a genuine argument and is not being decided on this page.

The only thing on the table is one sentence, in English, said once, before the switch rather than after it.

And you are permitted to say the sentence and then pray past it. The word puts confession and relief in the very next line of that psalm, and the Spirit is the one who makes that an order of operations rather than a demand.