The Answer She Has Ready

She has it ready before they finish the question.

Oh, you know. Same as ever. Plodding on. And then a small laugh that she has been doing for so long she can hear it coming out of her mouth from about a foot away.

It is a good answer. It closes the subject without being rude, it lets the other person off, and it is not a lie, exactly. She is plodding on. That is true.

What it does not contain is any of the following.

That it has been six years and two months. That she has stopped counting in years because years sound like a lot and started counting in a private unit she is embarrassed about. That there was a Thursday in February when she sat in the car in a supermarket car park for fifty minutes and did not go in.

She has not told a single person the truth about it since it started.

There are reasons and they are good ones. The first few people she told were kind and then were kind again and then, without meaning anything by it, started to look slightly tired when it came up, and she saw it, and she stopped.

So she has an answer ready, and it works, and it has cost her more than she has ever added up.

If you have an answer ready, come and stand over here with a coffee. Nobody is going to ask you the question.

The Bible has a man asking how long, four times over

There is a psalm that opens in a way most people would edit out of a book about God, and God did not edit it out.

How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?Psalm 13:1

Four times in two verses, that man says how long.

Read the second question. How long will you hide your face. That is not a polite formulation. That is somebody saying out loud, in a song that got kept and sung by a whole nation, that God appeared to be hiding.

Nobody corrected it. There is no footnote. It was not tidied before it went in.

You have permission to say the true thing about the length of it, and Scripture has already said it louder than you would. Psalm 13:1 puts a man's unedited how long into the book and leaves it standing, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that psalm rather than a smoother one, which means the honesty you have been holding in is a thing God has demonstrated a taste for.

The answer you have ready is not dishonesty, and it is expensive

Now let me be careful, because I am not going to tell you off for the answer.

You built it for good reasons. You watched people get tired. You are not imagining that and you did not misread it, and you protected them and yourself with a sentence and a small laugh, and that was a reasonable thing to do. Proverbs 14:10 says the heart knoweth his own bitterness, and it is written as a plain observation about how people are made rather than as a complaint about them, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things and has read the long version every time.

But it has a cost, and the figure is roughly known, which is why this page is still open.

The cost is that six years of a rehearsed answer means six years of nobody knowing, and a sickness nobody knows about does not stop being a sickness. It just stops being visible, including, after long enough, to the person carrying it.

You are carrying something real, and naming it does not make it larger. Proverbs 13:12 says hope deferred makes the heart sick and stops there, without one word of correction attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that clause in that order, which means the thing you have been covering with a laugh is a thing the word states plainly.

And I want to say what is not coming, because you are braced for it.

Nobody is going to tell you to hold on, or to keep going, or that God is never late. Some of that may be true and none of it is what a person in month seventy-four needs handed to them by a website.

The proverb does not instruct the sick heart at all. There is no command in it. It is a description, and a description is what you give somebody when the useful thing is to be seen.

You are seen rather than assessed, and the seeing arrived before any advice did. Psalm 56:8 asks whether the tears are not in His book and speaks of them being put in His bottle, and it is His Spirit who makes that a thing a person can lean on, which means the six years you have never described to anybody have been described somewhere with great care.

God is the one holding you, and He has held you through every repetition of that answer.