The Thing I Would Deny Out Loud

If somebody asked him directly, he would say yes. Of course he still believes it could happen.

He would say it easily, without hesitating, and it would not feel like lying while he said it, and that is the strangest part of this whole business. The denial is ready. It sits at the front. It comes out smooth.

And then he would drive home and know exactly what he had done.

He gave up on that particular thing about three years ago. He cannot date it precisely because there was no day, only a slow sinking of an expectation below the waterline. And what remains is a man who talks about it in the future tense in company and has no future tense for it at all in private.

He is not being deceptive. He would tell you that if he said the true thing out loud, one of two things would follow: somebody would try to fix him, or somebody would agree with him. And he could not bear either.

If there is something you would deny having given up on, come and sit on the sand a while. Nobody here is going to try to fix you or agree with you.

Why the denial is the reasonable move

Let us look at what the denial is actually doing, because it is not deceit and calling it that will get us nowhere.

It is protecting two things at once. It protects other people from a conversation they will handle badly, and it protects a man from being handed either a repair kit or a shrug, and both of those responses hurt in ways that are hard to explain to somebody who has not received them.

So the denial is not a moral failure. It is a door held shut by somebody who has been through it before and did not like what came in.

You are not being called a liar here. Nothing about the door you hold shut has changed how God receives you, and He has never once needed you to say it in company. I am not saying it to be easy on you. The written word says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), which accounts for what three years does to a person rather than being disappointed by it, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who makes that hold on a drive home.

The questions kept in the songbook

Here is what steadied me, and it is not a request that you say it to anybody.

There is a psalm where a man asks a run of questions that most people would not say out loud in a church building, and every one of them made it into the collection God gave His people to sing.

Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?Psalm 77:9

Read the ones around it too. Will the Lord cast off for ever. Is his mercy clean gone for ever. Doth his promise fail for evermore. That is four questions in three verses, and they are not rhetorical flourishes, they are what a man in the dark actually thought.

Nobody softened them. They went into the songbook as questions, and generations of people have sung them out loud in company without anybody treating it as a scandal.

You have a place in Scripture for the sentence you will not say, and the Word kept the questions unedited. That is written down as a man asked them, and the Holy Spirit sets that down in front of somebody who has a smooth denial ready at the front.

Nothing is being predicted, and nothing is being demanded

Something has to be said plainly on both sides here.

Nobody is asking you to tell your family, or your friends, or the person who would try to fix you. There is no requirement anywhere on this page that a private thing be made public in order for any of this to be true.

And no forecast is being offered either. I do not know whether that thing changes. This page will not say it is coming, or close, or about to move, because I have not been given that and an invented promise would cost you more than the quiet has.

You have God's disposition toward you settled, and nothing about your outcome is being announced and nothing is being asked of you socially. Scripture says the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering (2 Peter 3:9), which speaks about His character and never about a schedule, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who has carried three years of a sunk expectation without ever requiring it to be declared.

And if this has cost more than anybody on this shore knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.