The Right to Be Understood

She said it out loud for the first time on a coast path, to nobody, with the wind taking most of it.

She said: I think she is never going to see it differently.

And then she stopped walking, because a sentence like that has weight and you cannot really carry it and keep going at the same time.

It was not despair. That is what surprised her afterwards. It was the strange flat relief of finally saying a true thing, the way it feels when a doctor names something you have privately known for a year.

Because she had been waiting. Not obviously, not in a way anybody would have called waiting. She had simply been living with a small permanent expectation running in the background, that one day, in some form, that particular person would understand what had actually happened, and would say so, and something in her would come back down and rest.

Years of that. Quiet, undramatic, and always there.

And on that path she saw it plainly for the first time: it is not coming. Not because that person is cruel, and not because she is stupid. She is neither. She has a version, she has held it a long time, and she has built a good deal of her own understanding of that whole period around it, and people do not dismantle that at sixty because somebody wants them to.

I am not going to tell you she might yet come round. She might. I have seen it happen twice and it was beautiful both times, and I have seen the other thing a great deal more often, and this message is written for the more often.

And I am not going to ask you what happened. Not one detail. This is about the waiting, not the file.

But I do want to be honest about the size of the thing you are putting down, because a great deal of writing on this subject treats it as though it were small.

To be understood by somebody who was there is one of the deepest things a human being wants. Wanting it is not weakness and it is not pride. It is one of the ways we know we exist.

So let us not pretend this is easy. Let us instead find out where that particular weight is actually supposed to sit.

The psalm moves one word, and everything moves with it

Psalm 62 is a short psalm written by a man who has been misrepresented, and it repeats itself on purpose.

My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.Psalm 62:5

Two words to hold. Only, and expectation.

Expectation there is not a mood or an optimism. It is closer to what a person is leaning on: the thing you are counting on to hold, the outcome your weight is resting against. Everybody has one. You cannot live without leaning on something, and Psalm 62:5 is interested in exactly one question, which is what yours is resting against, while the Holy Spirit stands ready to take the weight.

And only is the word that makes the psalm hard and makes it work. Not mostly. Not primarily. David is doing something specific with it: he is taking his whole leaning weight off every person in the situation and putting it in one place, and the psalm goes on for several verses about how unreliable the alternatives are.

So the question the verse asks you on that coast path is not whether you would like to be understood. Of course you would. The question is what you have been leaning on.

Here is what I want to hand you, and I will do it slowly because it costs something. You are already held by God rather than by a conversation that is never going to happen, and Psalm 62:5 moves your whole leaning weight onto Him in one instruction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a person you love and cannot reach.

Notice what the psalm does not do. It does not say the other people were fine. Read the verses around it and they are not flattering at all. David is not being told to think better of anybody. He is being told where to lean, which is a separate question from what he thinks of them.

That matters here, because you are not being asked to decide she is right. You are not being asked to accept her version. You are being asked to stop resting your weight on her ever changing it, and Psalm 62:5 offers the Holy Spirit as what you lean on instead rather than offering you a better opinion of anybody.

And there is something in the verse for the grief, too, which is why I chose this psalm and not a brighter one. My soul, wait thou. He is talking to himself, out loud, in the middle of it. That is not a man who has finished feeling it. That is a man steadying himself while it is still going on, and Scripture kept the sentence in that state rather than tidying it up afterwards.

You have permission to grieve this and still be steady, and Psalm 62:5 was written by somebody doing exactly that, and the Holy Spirit is not requiring you to be finished with the sadness before He becomes your rest.