Not a Fault in the Build

It was in the kitchen afterwards, with the plates stacked and the tap running.

His sister was drying and not looking at him, and she said it in the kindest voice she owns. Just, not tonight. Okay? And she squeezed his arm on the way past with the tea towel over her shoulder, and she meant it well, and she was not wrong about the evening, and it was the single most careful sentence anybody has ever said to him.

He said of course. He said he was sorry. He carried the glasses through.

That was eleven months ago.

He has been very good since. He has learned where the line is and he stops about a foot short of it now. He can sit through a whole meal, all the way to the coffee, without once saying the thing that is in him, and the family have noticed how much easier he is these days, and one of them told him so at Easter, warmly, as a compliment.

And he drove home from that meal with his hands on the wheel at ten and two and something in his chest sitting there like a stone.

He has decided that this is maturity. That is what he calls it. He is learning discretion, he tells himself. He is learning to read a room.

Only, discretion does not usually feel like a hand over your own mouth.

And now I am going to stop saying he.

Because you know that kitchen. Maybe it was a colleague who said something at a leaving do. Maybe it was a look, not a sentence, and nobody had to say anything at all. Maybe it was your own child, at fifteen, saying please, Mum.

And you have turned yourself down since. Not once, in a moment of decision, but slowly, a click at a time, over months, until you got to here: a person who still burns about the same thing they have always burned about, and who has stopped saying it out loud, and who is beginning to suspect that they are simply too much.

You are not a design fault

I want to say the tender thing first, because you have been carrying an unkind version of this for months.

The people who asked you to ease off are not your enemies. Do not let a single sentence in this message turn them into that. Your sister was tired, it had been a long evening, there was a birthday going on, and she loves you. She was not passing judgement on your soul in a kitchen with a tea towel. Nearly always, that request is somebody's tiredness, not their verdict, and the ones we love get the tiredness because they are safe.

And here is the other half of it, and this is the half nobody has said to you. You are also tired of you. That is the part you have never admitted to anyone. There are mornings you would give anything to be somebody who could just let a conversation be about the football.

So hear this plainly. Being unable to stop is not a personality defect, and it is not immaturity, and it is not a lack of self control. Two men once stood in front of the most powerful room in their city and were told, formally, with authority, to stop. And what they said back was not defiance and it was not a strategy.

For we are not able to stop speaking of what we have seen and heard.Acts 4:20

Read the grammar of that. Not, we refuse to stop. Not, we have decided that stopping would be wrong. Not able to. It is a statement about how they were made by then, and what had happened to them, and what a person becomes when they have actually seen something.

And you are not a design fault. The word puts that sentence in the mouths of two men standing in front of a hostile council and treats it as a description rather than a sin, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in somebody who has been calling it immaturity for eleven months.

That is not a boast. It is closer to a confession. There is a way of being built that has a mouth in it, and the people built that way have always been slightly difficult at dinner, and the church has always needed them, and they have always been tiring, and both of those things are true at once and neither one cancels the other.

And notice what that kind of building is for. In the letter where those five kinds of person are listed, they are not listed as ranks. Nobody is being given a title to put after their name. They are given to a body so that everybody else in it gets equipped, which means the thing in you was never issued for your standing. It was issued for other people. That is why it will not sit quietly. It is not yours to keep down, and it is not yours to be proud of either, and there is a great rest in that.

You are not too much. You are aimed at nothing, and an unaimed thing floods a room.

And what is in you was issued for other people. The word gives the five for the perfecting of the saints and the edifying of the body, which puts the purpose outside you entirely, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a rest rather than a demand on somebody driving home with a stone in their chest.

And your standing never rested on how a dinner went. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith and that not of yourselves, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that a tea towel over a shoulder in a kitchen did not move a thing that was settled long before.