I Watched It Hurt Somebody And I Stopped

Daniel has not opened his mouth in a room like that for nine years, and he can tell you the exact evening.

Three people spoke. All three said the same kind of thing, which is to say all three told somebody what was going to happen.

Two of those did not happen. Nobody ever came back to say so, and the people concerned made their own quiet adjustments and stayed, and it cost them something small.

The third one was said to a woman he knew. He is not going to write down what it was. It concerned her family and it was delivered warmly, in front of about sixty people, and it was specific, and it did not come true, and she left about four months later and he has not seen her since.

He is fifty-four. He has thought about that evening more than he has thought about almost anything else in his life as a believer.

And what he decided, without ever saying it out loud, is that the safest possible thing a man like him can do is be the one who does not speak. He has held that position for nine years and he has held it well. He is a steady presence in every room he is in and nobody has ever been damaged by anything he has said in one.

The trouble is that he has begun to notice what else has gone quiet with it.

There are people he has been given something for. Not a prediction. Nothing like a prediction. Just a plain, obvious, true thing that he can see about a person and that they clearly cannot see about themselves, and he has been carrying about six of those for years, and he has said none of them, because the door he shut nine years ago was a wide door and it did not shut selectively.

You may know that door.

Maybe you also saw something go badly. Maybe you took the safest available position. And maybe you have started to notice what the safety is costing other people.

What the verse says it is for

There is a verse that describes this in an ordinary church setting, and it states the purpose in plain words at the end, and the purpose is not what you watched.

For ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted.1 Corinthians 14:31

That all may learn, and all may be comforted.

Those are the two stated outcomes. Learning and comfort. That is the whole of what the verse says this is for, and it is written by the man who is at that moment sorting out a chaotic meeting and putting fences around everything in it.

Read the two nouns again and hold them against your evening. Nobody learned anything that night. Nobody was comforted. A woman was handed a specific future about her family in front of sixty people, and four months later she was gone.

Which means what you watched was not this failing. It was something else entirely, wearing the name.

And the verse also says one by one, which is a phrase about order and pace and not about a platform, and the whole chapter it sits in exists because that church was doing this badly and Paul was building fences rather than closing the door.

And what you saw was not the thing you have been avoiding for nine years. The written word names learning and comfort as the entire stated purpose, in the same chapter written to fix a room that had gone wrong, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a man who has replayed one evening for a decade.

And He speaks and you can carry it plainly. The word puts the two outcomes in ordinary language, and the Spirit is the one who supplies what is carried rather than requiring you to have foreseen anything.

The door that shut wider than you meant

Now the mechanism, because you did the right thing and it had a side effect you never chose.

What you actually decided, that evening, was: I will not do what those three did. That decision was correct. It remains correct. I would not change one word of it.

But a decision made in a room at that temperature does not get made with a scalpel. It gets made with a door, and the door you shut had the three predictions on the far side of it and it also had six ordinary true sentences about six ordinary people, and it did not know the difference because you were in no condition to draw one that night.

Nine years later the ordinary sentences are still behind it.

That is not cowardice and it is not disobedience. It is what a conscientious man does after he watches somebody get hurt, and the fact that the door was too wide is a property of doors and not a fault in him.

And you shut a door rather than failed a test. The word says God has not given us the spirit of fear, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a description of what has been sitting on a room for nine years rather than an accusation of the man in it.

And nothing about you is under review for nine years of silence. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man whose silence has genuinely protected people.

What is actually on offer here

Let me be plain about the size of this, because you are braced for me to send you back into that room and I am not.

Nothing here asks you to speak in a meeting. Nothing here asks you to stand anywhere, or to be introduced, or to say thus saith about anything, or to hand anybody a future.

Nobody on this page is going to tell you what will happen to a person. Not their health, not their marriage, not a date, not an outcome. That is not this and it was never this, and the fence in the chapter is exactly where the trouble came through.

The only thing on offer is one true sentence, said quietly, to one person, off to the side, about who they already are.

That is small enough to be survivable if you are wrong, and it is the entire distance between what you have been avoiding and what has been sitting in you for years.

And you are permitted to say a true thing to one person. The word names comfort as an outcome this is for, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a return to a platform you were right to leave.