The Thing She Will Not Say Out Loud Now

She used to say things.

Not wildly. She was never one of those. But she was the sort of woman who would say, out loud, in front of people, what she believed God was going to do about a particular situation, and she would say it with her name on it.

She does not do that any more.

What she does now is a thing she has got very good at without ever practicing. She says: we will see what the Lord does. She says: I am trusting Him with it. She says: it is in His hands, and then she smiles and it is a lovely thing to say and it commits her to absolutely nothing.

Nobody could quote any of that back at her in eighteen months' time. That is the point of it, and she knows that is the point of it, and she has known for about four years.

Here is what happened that changed it, and she will not describe it in detail even to herself.

She said a thing. In front of people. With her name on it.

And it did not happen, and one person, who was not being cruel and did not think they were doing anything, said something about it in front of others roughly a year later that she can still hear.

So now she keeps it vague, and vague is safe, and safe has turned out to be its own kind of expensive.

If you have gone deliberately vague, come and sit down. Nobody is going to ask you to say anything out loud.

The holding is fastened to His faithfulness, not to your wording

There is a sentence in Hebrews about holding on to hope, and the second half of it moves the whole weight off you.

Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; for he is faithful that promised.Hebrews 10:23

Read the reason he gives. Not because we are strong. Not because we phrased it well. Not because we were right last time.

For He is faithful that promised.

The security in that sentence is entirely on the other side. The reason a person can hold on is a fact about God's character rather than a fact about their track record, which means the thing you got wrong four years ago does not appear in the calculation anywhere.

You are holding on to something whose reliability was never resting on your accuracy. Hebrews 10:23 grounds the holding in the faithfulness of the One who promised, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the guarantee of what is coming in Ephesians 1:14, which means your wording was never load-bearing.

Vague is not humility, and it is costing you

Now the part that needs saying, and I am going to say it warmly because you did not deserve what happened.

What that person said, in front of others, a year later, was careless. They probably do not remember it. You have carried it for four years and built a whole manner of speaking around it, and none of that is your fault. Proverbs 12:18 says there is that speaketh like the piercings of a sword, and it is written of the one doing the speaking rather than the one being cut, and it is the same Spirit who heals what a careless sentence opened.

But look at what the vagueness actually does.

It does not make you humbler. Humility would be saying the thing and adding that you might be wrong about the timing. What you have instead is a form of words designed so that nothing you say can ever be checked, and that is not humility, it is armor, and armor is heavy and it keeps things out in both directions.

You are not required to be unquotable in order to be safe. Romans 8:1 says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Spirit of life named immediately after who made you free, which means the tribunal you have been dressing for does not sit.

And I am not going to ask you to say anything out loud in front of anybody. Not today, not as a test, and not as proof of anything. That is not what is being offered and it would be putting you straight back in the room where you got hurt.

I am also not going to give you a date, or a sign, or a way of being sure this time. This tradition learned in public what that costs and this site will not sell it back to anybody.

You are allowed to expect something again, quietly, without a sentence anybody could hold you to. Titus 2:13 fastens the looking to that blessed hope and the appearing of Christ Himself rather than to any prediction, and it is His Spirit who keeps such a thing alive in a person who has stopped talking about it, which means expecting and announcing were never the same act.

God is the one holding you, and He was holding you in that room a year later when somebody said the careless thing.