The Spot Under His Breastbone

It is about two inches under the breastbone and slightly to the left.

He could put his finger on it. He has, a few times, sitting in the car in a car park, pressing it the way you press a bruise to check whether it is still there.

It has been there for about three years.

At first it was a feeling, and feelings move around, and he did not think much about it. Somewhere in the last eighteen months it stopped moving and settled, and now it has an address, and it goes off when the subject comes anywhere near him.

He has a map now. This is the part he has never told anybody.

He knows which conversations set it off, and he steers them. He knows which aisle in the shop, and he goes round the long way, and he has been doing that so long that the long way now feels like the normal route. He knows the four minutes in a Sunday service where it will come, and he has got extremely good at looking like a man listening.

He knows which of his friends will ask, and roughly when, and he has an answer ready that closes the subject warmly and leaves everybody feeling the conversation went well.

None of this is dramatic. That is the thing he would want you to understand. He is not falling apart. He gets up, he works, he is good company, he laughs at things and means it.

He has simply been quietly organizing a life around a spot two inches under a bone, for three years, without ever once saying that sentence out loud.

And what has started to trouble him lately is not the spot. It is that he has stopped expecting the spot to go, and has begun instead to plan for a life with it in.

If there is a place in your body where it lives, come and sit down on the blanket. Nobody here is going to ask you what it is about.

A man in the songbook gives the address of it

There is a psalm where somebody describes what a long trouble is doing to him, and he does it almost entirely in the body.

I am feeble and sore broken: I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart.Psalm 38:8

Feeble. Sore broken. Roared.

He does not describe his beliefs. He does not report on the condition of his faith, or explain what he has concluded about God, or offer any interpretation at all. He tells you what it is doing to him physically, and then he tells you what came out of him because of it.

And the phrase at the end is the one worth carrying. The disquietness of my heart. Not the wickedness of it, not the weakness of it. The unrest.

You are being described in a book that names this in the body rather than in the theology. Psalm 38:8 records a man giving the physical account of a long trouble without one word of self accusation attached, and the Holy Spirit kept that description in the songbook of God's people, which means a spot under a breastbone is inside Scripture's own vocabulary and not a thing you invented.

Nobody here is going to hurry you

Let us say plainly what is not going to happen on this page, because the bracing starts at the beginning and is exhausting all on its own.

Nobody is going to tell you to hope harder. Nobody here is going to explain what the three years have been for, or hand you the second half of a verse before the first half has been allowed to stand.

You are not being charged with anything, and the sickness in your chest has never once been read as unbelief. Proverbs 13:12 says hope deferred maketh the heart sick and then stops there, with no correction and no advice attached to that clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it in exactly that order, which means a long wait producing what you are carrying is precisely what the word says happens to a person.

Not to a faithless person. To a person. It is written as a fact about how human beings are made.

The map is not cowardice

Now the long way round the shop, because it has been getting quietly filed under weakness for about a year.

Every one of those adjustments is a man managing something. The route, the four minutes, the ready answer that closes a subject warmly. That is not avoidance in the way you have been calling it avoidance. That is somebody keeping himself functional and keeping his friends comfortable at the same time, which is a considerable amount of work done for other people while carrying something.

You were doing the work of two men and nobody has ever thanked you for the second one. Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, and it is written to a whole church rather than to one strong member, and it is the same Spirit who knits people together, which means the arrangement where you carry yours alone and everybody else's out loud was never the design.