Four Months and I Have Not Said It

Rewi has known since the March and has said it to nobody.

Not his wife. Not his brother, who works alongside him. Not the doctor, who told him, and who does not count, because being told is not the same as saying.

Thirty-one years he has done this work. He knows this stretch of coast the way most people know a hallway. He can read a swell four hours ahead. He has pulled two men out of that water in his life and would tell you neither of them was much of a story.

And in the March a man in a room told him that the thing he has been doing for thirty-one years is not something he can keep doing.

He has not said it out loud. Once.

He has said other things. He has said he is taking it easier. He has said his shoulder is playing up, which is true and is about eleven percent of it. He has let people draw a conclusion that is smaller than the fact and he has not corrected them.

Because here is the arithmetic in him, and he knows how it sounds and he cannot get out from underneath it.

While it is unsaid it is a thing in a room somewhere. The moment he says it in his own kitchen, in his own voice, in front of his own wife, it becomes what he is. And then it is real and then it is over and there is no getting back to the Tuesday before.

So he goes down anyway. Not out. Down to the shore, most mornings, and he stands and looks at the water and says nothing about it to anybody, including God.

That last part is the one nobody would guess. He has prayed every day since he was nineteen and he has not prayed about this.

Not because he is angry. Because if he says it to God it will have been said, and he cannot risk it being said.

His grandson found him down there in the June. Eleven years old, with a thermos, sent by his grandmother.

He sat on the rail and did not say anything for a while, which is a thing that runs in that family.

Then he said, "Koro, are you sad?"

And Rewi said, "No, boy."

And the boy said, "Okay," and poured the tea.

And Rewi sat there with a plastic cup in his hand and thought, quite clearly: I have just lied to a child, and it took me half a second, and I have been doing that in a much larger way since March.

Now let me ask you.

How long have you known?

There is no room He is outside of

Psalm 139 asks a question in the middle of it that most people read as poetry and which is, if you are carrying something unsaid, extremely practical.

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.Psalm 139:7 to 8

David lists the extremes. Up as far as up goes. Down as far as down goes. And then he adds the far side of the sea and the dark, and every one of them comes back with the same answer.

You are there.

Now apply it to the place you have actually been hiding, which is not a geography.

It is a silence.

And that is the thing this psalm is doing that nobody notices: it removes every possible location, and the last one it removes is the dark, which is the one we actually use. Even the darkness is not dark to You.

So hear this said over you, standing at the shore with a plastic cup in your hand. You are not carrying this alone and you never have been, because the silence you have been holding it in was never a room God was outside of. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named in that very verse as the one you cannot get away from, which means He has been inside the unsaid thing with you since the March.

Now let me say something about the silence itself, because I am not going to shame you for it.

There are reasons for it and some of them are good.

You have not been lying to protect yourself. You have been holding it because a thing said in a kitchen changes a family's week, and because you did not want to be looked at differently by people who have looked at you the same way for thirty-one years, and because there is a version of you in their heads that you have been reluctant to take off them.

That is not cowardice. That is a man who loves his household.

And it has cost you, and here is the exact cost. You have been carrying it in the one place where nobody could carry it with you.

Now let me be careful about what I am not saying.

I am not telling you God arranged the March in order to teach you anything, and I am not telling you there is a lesson in this that you are failing to identify. That sentence gets handed to people constantly and it is not in Psalm 139 and it is not here.

And I am not going to promise you an outcome. I do not know what next year looks like on that coast.

What I can tell you is the one thing this whole site rests on, and it is not small. God does His most decisive work in the exact place where nothing about Him is visible: a cross, in the dark, with a cry and no answer and every observable fact saying He was not there.

Which means a silence you have kept for four months is not an empty room. It is precisely the kind of room He is usually in.

And there is one more thing about tonight, and it is smaller than you think.

You are not being asked to tell your wife tonight.

That conversation is real and it is coming and it is not this article's business to set the date. What you are being asked to do tonight is one thing only: say it once, out loud, to God.

Not because He does not know. He has known since before the man in the room did. Because you have never once let it be said in His hearing on purpose, and there is a difference between a thing God knows and a thing you have handed Him.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote that we do not tell God our troubles in order to inform Him, since He knows them better than we do, but in order to stop being alone in them, and that the moment a thing is spoken to Him it stops being a secret and becomes a burden two are holding.