The Sentence I Said To An Empty Room

Three houses before two o'clock, and this is the big one, the one with the wood burner and the view down the valley and the coffee machine that nobody ever manages to work.

Marie has the radio on in the kitchen and Ola is doing the downstairs and they are getting on with it the way you do when the day has a shape and the shape is tight. Beds stripped, towels counted, the fridge wiped, the little basket of sachets topped up out of the box in the car.

Upstairs, in the front bedroom, the family have left a note on the pillow. Two lines in a lovely round hand. Thanks so much for everything, the house has been perfect, we are already talking about next year!! Two exclamation marks. Underneath it, half a bottle of something and a bag of nice biscuits with the ribbon still on.

And Marie stands there with an armful of sheets and hears herself say it.

She will not repeat it afterwards, not to Ola, not to anybody. It is one sentence, it is about people she has never met, and it comes out of her mouth in an empty bedroom at eleven in the morning, flat and hard and entirely meant.

Then Ola calls up the stairs asking whether the good hoover is up there, and Marie says no love, it is in the boot, in a completely normal voice.

She carries the sheets down and something in her chest has gone cold, and it is not about the family and it is not about the note. It is this: she used to be somebody who liked people. Three years of the same arithmetic at her own kitchen table and she has turned into a woman who says things like that in an empty room, and she does not know what to do about it, and she has stopped praying about it because she does not much want God in the room when that voice is out.

You know what that is. Something has gone hard in you that was not hard before. You hear it in your own voice, in the sideways remark, in the flatness that arrives when somebody tells you good news. And the frightening part is not the money, though the money is real and it is grinding. The frightening part is who you are becoming while you carry it, and the quiet certainty that God has heard every word of it and has begun to think rather less of you.

Nobody Is Going To Correct You Here

Let me say the whole of it plainly before anything else, because I know exactly how braced a person is by this point in an article like this.

You are not being told off. There is no correction coming later in this piece, no gentle pivot where I turn round and name what you have said as the real problem, and no requirement that you repent of anything before God will come near you this morning. That is not me being soft with you. It is what the written word does with people in your exact condition, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land as relief rather than as a technicality.

Because a man in the Bible said your sentence, and God kept it in the songbook.

He is called Asaph. He wrote worship music for public use, and the psalm he wrote about this period of his life does not clean itself up. He had watched people with no interest in God float through life with the ease of a boat with an engine, while he did everything right and got up every morning to the same grinding arithmetic. And here is what he says about the state he got into.

"When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you."Psalm 73:21-22

Read that as a man's own description of himself. Not sour. Not a bit cynical. A beast. And that line was written down, set to music, and sung by the congregation, which means the community of God's people looked at a man who had gone hard and did not delete him from the hymn book.

Now the next line, which is the one I actually want in your hands.

"Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand."Psalm 73:23

Nevertheless. Not therefore. Not once he had sorted himself out. In the very same breath as the confession that he had behaved like an animal in God's presence, he says the thing that had been true the entire time: God had hold of his hand and had never let go of it.

You are being held right now, in exactly the state you are actually in. That is written into a psalm by somebody who had gone harder than you have, and His Spirit is the one holding you steady while you read it. Nobody unclasped anything. God did not wait at arm's length for the sourness to pass.

Naomi Came Back And Changed Her Name

There is a second picture, and it is in a book that a whole community read out loud every year.

A woman comes back to her home town with nothing. The women of the town come out and say her name, Naomi, which means pleasant, and she stops them in the street.

Do not call me Naomi, she says. Call me Mara, because the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full and He has brought me back empty.

Sit with what happens next in the text, because it is what this whole article is standing on. Nothing happens next. Nobody corrects her theology. No narrator steps in to explain that she has misread her circumstances or spoken out of turn. The book simply records what she said, in her own words, with her own name for God's dealings in it, and then goes quietly on with the story of what He was already doing in that harvest field while she was renaming herself in the road.

You have permission to be honest with God, and you have had it the whole time. That is not my idea; it is what Scripture does when it hands two of its most bitter first-person sentences straight to the congregation without softening either of them, and His Spirit is the one who put them in your reach this morning.

And hear this, because it is the difference between the truth and a slogan. Nothing about your situation is a verdict on your faith. The hardness is not a sign that something has gone wrong in you spiritually, and the shortfall is not a bill for something you failed to believe. Faith does not make lack disappear, and anybody who told you otherwise was selling something that Scripture never sold. What is actually happening is that a person under sustained pressure has grown a hard rind, the way anything does, and God is not offended by the rind.

The Softening Is His Work And It Is Already Going On

So then what changes, if nothing is being demanded of you?

The one thing that has been avoided all this while: saying it to Him.

Not confessing it. I am choosing that word carefully, because you will hear this as a religious transaction if I let you. Saying it. Out loud, in the words you actually use, the way Asaph did, and the way Naomi did in front of the whole town.

You are safe to do that. It is written that God knows what we are made of and remembers that we are dust, and His Spirit does not flinch at a sentence He has already heard you think forty times. The softening is His work, and He is doing it in a person who has not apologized, which is the only kind of person there has ever been.