The Ones Who Were Hurt Are Not a Footnote

Dominic has not been able to finish a prayer about himself in two years.

He starts them. He is not one of these people who has stopped praying. He gets up early, he still has the same chair, and he can pray for other people for forty minutes without effort. His prayers for other people are actually better than they used to be, which is a strange thing to notice about yourself.

But when he turns it toward his own situation, three names arrive.

Not accusingly. That is what makes it so hard to argue with. They do not arrive as an attack. They arrive the way a fact arrives. He begins a sentence about being restored and the sentence gets about six words in and then there are three people in the room who did not choose any of this and who are still living with it, and the sentence simply stops.

He has tried a few approaches over two years.

He tried praying for them first and then for himself, and the second half still would not come, because it felt like using them as a doorway.

He tried the thing a well meaning man told him once, which was to receive it and move on and stop wallowing. He tried that for about a month. It made him a worse person, quietly, in ways his wife noticed before he did.

He tried simply not praying about himself at all, and that is what he has settled into, and it has the shape of humility and it is not humility. It is a man who has decided that his own restoration would be taking something from three people who have already lost enough.

And here is what nobody has ever said to him.

Nobody has told him that God can hold both. That the settling of his standing and the honoring of what those three people carry are not competing claims on a limited supply, and that he has been rationing something that was never scarce.

And this is where I stop writing about Dominic, because you have names.

You know how many. I am not going to ask what happened and I am not going to help you get around them, because getting around them is not what you want and it would not work anyway.

The one sacrifice that is not despised

I want to give you a line from the most famous prayer ever prayed after a public collapse in which real people were seriously harmed.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.Psalm 51:17

Look at the word despise, because it is the load bearing word and it is doing something very gentle.

He does not say God rewards a broken heart. He does not say God is pleased by it, which would be a horrible thing to say and would make God strange. He says God will not despise it: will not turn from it, will not treat it as worthless, will not find it too much.

That is a sentence for a man who has begun to suspect that his own brokenness is self indulgent.

And note what Psalm 51 does not do, because this is the part that will free you. It does not stop caring about the people who were harmed. The psalm never pretends the damage was small and it never asks God to make the writer feel better about it. It holds both, in the same prayer, without canceling either.

So take that into your chair at six in the morning. You are not despised in the middle of this, and Psalm 51:17 says God will not turn from a broken and contrite heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man tender rather than letting him go hard or go numb.

And that is exactly why the ration was wrong. A man who refuses his own restoration in order to honor the people he hurt ends up unable to do either well, because a hard man makes a poor repairer, and the written word never asks for that trade. Scripture holds contrition and mercy in the same breath, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps them from collapsing into each other.