It Cost Him His Name

Dale said eleven words in a meeting in 2019 and a man he had known for twenty years left that church within four months.

He has gone over the eleven words probably a thousand times. They were not accusatory in form. He did not name anything. What he said was a version of I have a real unease about this and I cannot tell you why, and he said it in a room of six people about a proposal that a particular man had brought.

The proposal did not go ahead. That was the right outcome; Dale still thinks so, and two other people have said so since.

But something happened to the man that Dale did not intend and could not stop. The room had heard a respected older member say he had an unease, with no content attached, about something a man was proposing. And with no content to argue against, nothing could be cleared. There was no charge to answer.

Within a month people were slightly different with him. Within four he was gone, to another church twenty miles off, and he told people it was about the drive.

Nothing was ever proven and nothing was ever disproven, because there was never anything to prove.

Dale is fifty-eight. He suspects, still, that his unease was about something real. That suspicion is the part that will not resolve, because it cannot be tested and because he can no longer tell whether he wants it to be true so that the eleven words were worth what they cost.

You may know that room.

Maybe you have said one true unnameable sentence in front of people. Maybe you were right. And maybe that has turned out to be worth considerably less than you expected.

The measure is what it sets alight

There is a passage in James about the tongue that is unusually physical, and the measurement it uses is not size.

Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity.James 3:5-6

How great a matter a little fire kindleth.

James is not saying the tongue is large. He says explicitly that it is little. What he does is measure it by consequence rather than by size, which is the only honest way to measure a spark.

Eleven words is a little member doing what a little member does.

And notice that James does not distinguish between true fires and false ones. A spark from an accurate flint burns exactly as well as a spark from a wrong one. That is the part almost nobody says out loud, and it is why I was probably right has not helped you once in six years.

Being right does not make a fire smaller. It only changes how the person who lit it feels about themselves afterwards, and it has not even done that for you.

And being right was never going to make the fire smaller. The written word measures the tongue by what it kindles rather than by whether the speaker was correct, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man who has counted eleven words a thousand times.

And you are not required to establish whether you were right to be settled about this. The word puts the weight on the kindling and never on the accuracy, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than reopening a case that cannot be tested.

Why unnameable is the dangerous form

Let me be exact about what went wrong, because it was not the perception and it was not exactly the speaking.

It was that you said something with no content in a room.

A specific accusation can be answered. A man can say that is not true and here is why, and other people can weigh it, and the matter can be settled one way or the other and everybody moves on.

An unease with nothing attached cannot be answered at all. There is nothing to deny. And because a room cannot resolve it, the room resolves it the only way it can, which is by quietly adjusting around the person, and that adjustment is invisible and cumulative and nobody ever has to take responsibility for it.

Which means unnameable perception is the single most dangerous thing this gift produces, and it is dangerous in direct proportion to how respected the person saying it is. You were respected. That is why eleven words did what a hundred would not have.

And you are not the one who names it out loud, and this is what that rule is for. The word says a fool uttereth all his mind, but a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a protection of other people rather than a muzzle on you.

And nothing about you is under review for the six years of carrying it. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has been unable to test the one thing that might absolve him.

What is actually available now

I am not going to tell you to go and find him. I do not know your situation, or his, or whether that would be a repair or a second disturbance dressed as one, and a stranger who sends a man on that errand from this distance is not being helpful.

If it is live in you, take it to somebody who knows both of you and let them tell you whether anything should be done. Find someone. That is the whole of the practical advice and I am stopping there deliberately.

What is available regardless is the breath.

Because the eleven words did not arrive fully formed in a mouth. There was a moment, in that meeting, between the unease rising and the sentence starting, and that moment is the only place in this entire business where a person has any control at all.

And you have a gap between the seeing and the saying and it is yours. The word says let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the slowness, which is not caution and is not silence but a real interval.