The Defense You Never Get to Give

It has a first line. That is how you know it is real.

Most things a person turns over in the car do not have a first line. This one does, and it has been the same first line for a long time, and it arrives without being sent for. Usually at a red light. Sometimes at ten past four in the morning, in the flat gray hour when nothing is negotiable.

She has a whole speech. Four years of drafting, and she has never once said a word of it out loud.

It is a good speech. That is the awful part. It is fair, it is not self-pitying, it does not blame anybody, it does not ask for more than it should. She has cut the two lines that were too much. She has moved the part about what she actually did to the front, on purpose, because she is not trying to get out of anything.

And there is no version of her life in which she gets to give it.

There is no meeting. Nobody has convened one. The people it is addressed to are not sitting somewhere waiting for her account; they are getting on with Tuesday, and if you stopped them in a supermarket and asked, most of them would say something mild and true and then go back to the shopping. The conversation the speech is written for does not exist and never will.

So she keeps it. And it plays. And every time it plays it costs her about twenty minutes and a little bit of the day.

Here is the thing I want to say before anything else, and I want to say it gently because you have probably been handed the other thing already. I am not going to give you a better version.

No script. No line to have ready. No graceful way to bring it up at a wedding. I do not have one and I would not hand it over if I did, because the second a person has a good speech they start waiting for the chance to use it, and then they are living even further inside somebody else's head than they were before.

What I have is smaller. It is also the only thing that has ever actually worked.

The shortest psalm has the answer in it

Psalm 131 is three verses long. You can read the whole thing while the kettle boils, and it was written by a man who had rather a lot of people with rather a lot of opinions about him.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.Psalm 131:2

Weaned is an odd picture until somebody explains it, and then it never leaves you.

A nursing child at its mother is not calm. It is close, and it is content, and it is content because it is getting something. Take the thing away and the peace goes with it, because the peace was never in the closeness, it was in the supply.

A weaned child is different. A weaned child is on its mother for no reason at all. Not being fed. Not getting anything. Just there, quiet, because that is where it belongs and it has stopped needing a transaction to justify being there.

David says that is what he did with his soul. Not that the opinions stopped. Not that he won an argument. He weaned himself off needing the thing he had been going to the room to get.

And the thing you have been going to the room to get, four years running, is a hearing.

Here is what I want to put in your hands this morning, and it will not feel like much for about a week and then it will feel like everything. You are held right now without a hearing, and Psalm 131 gives that as a state a person can actually enter rather than a temperament some people are born with, and the Holy Spirit is the one who quiets a soul that has been drafting since a Tuesday four years ago.

Notice what the psalm does not do. It does not say the accusations were unfair. It does not say the writer was misunderstood. It does not adjudicate anything at all. The whole psalm simply steps out of the courtroom and goes and sits down somewhere else.

That is not defeat, and I want to be careful here, because a person can hear this as being told to give up on ever being seen properly. It is not that.

You are seen properly. That is not something you are waiting to become, it is the current position, and Psalm 139 says God searched you and knew you before anybody in your town had an opinion, and the Holy Spirit is not deferring that to a meeting that nobody is going to call.

There is a difference between being understood by everyone and being known by Someone. The first one is not available to anybody who has ever lived. The second one has been done, and it was done thoroughly, and it did not require your speech.

And the twenty minutes. Let us be honest about the twenty minutes. Four years of them is a great deal of a life spent in a room with people who are not in the room.