Say It In The Words You Actually Have

She read the page twice and could not have told you one thing it said.

Half past ten, the lamp on, everyone else in bed. She had made a promise to herself in January about reading it properly this year, and she had kept it for eleven days, and this was one of the eleven.

The words went in. They came out the other side. Somewhere around the third long sentence her eyes had carried on down the page while her mind went to the parking permit renewal, and she had noticed and gone back to the top, and it had happened again.

So she read it a third time, more slowly, the way you do when you are determined, and at the end of the third time she sat with her thumb on the page and had this thought.

This was not written for people like me.

She did not say it out loud. You never say this one out loud. It arrives fully formed at half past ten at night and it feels less like a thought and more like a fact you have finally admitted, and it goes something like: there is a kind of person who understands this, and they are not the kind of person who has to reread a sentence four times, and I have been pretending for years.

Then she closed it, and turned the lamp off, and lay in the dark feeling something she would have called guilt, but was not guilt.

It was exclusion.

She had come to believe, without ever deciding to, that God speaks a language she was never taught, and that everybody who is properly in the family learned it somewhere, and that she is a person standing politely at the edge of a conversation, nodding.

And you have had that night.

Yours might be a page of a letter with clauses in it that go on for six lines. It might be a psalm you have read forty times whose meaning slides off you every time. It might be a study group where somebody used a word you did not know and everybody nodded and you nodded, and you went home and looked it up in the car park.

You are not lazy and you are not slow. You have simply been carrying a suspicion that the door into this has a vocabulary test on it.

There is no test. There has never been a test. And what I want to show you now is that the whole architecture of the thing was built the other way round, deliberately, from the beginning, by God, on purpose, to keep exactly what you are afraid of from ever happening.

Not up there, not out there, here

There is a moment near the end of Moses' life where he stops instructing and starts almost pleading, and what he says is one of the most tender things in the whole book.

He tells them where the word is not.

This command I give you today is not too hard for you, and it is not far off. It is not in the heavens, so that you would say, who will go up for us and bring it down and let us hear it. It is not beyond the sea, so that you would say, who will cross over for us and bring it back and let us hear it. The word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.Deuteronomy 30:11 to 14

So hear this said over you, with the page still open and nothing on it that will stay. You have the word of God near you already, in your own mouth and in your own heart, and the vocabulary you actually use is the one He teaches in. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the teacher, and He has never once required a better register from anybody before He would begin.

He names the two places people put God's word when they want to be excused from it, and they are the same two places you have been putting it since January.

Up there, where you would need a specialist to fetch it. Out there, where you would need somebody with a boat.

And he takes both away.

Then look where he puts it instead, and notice the order, because the order is startling. In your mouth, and then in your heart. Not the other way round. The word is close enough to be spoken before it is close enough to be fully felt, which means saying it is not the thing you earn after understanding; saying it is how you get near it.

That is the door, and it is standing open, and it has your size of handle on it.

None of this is a complaint about scholars, and nothing on this page is going to sneer at a long sentence or an old translation. The people who spend their lives on the grammar of this are a gift to the whole family, and if you love the words your grandmother's Bible used, keep every one of them; there is no register of Scripture that is too holy to be clear, and none that is too plain to be true.

But your access does not run through any of them. It never did.

There was a man once who wore himself out confessing for hours and still walked out of the room afraid, and what eventually undid the fear was not a better vocabulary. It was hearing the thing said plainly enough to put his weight on it, and then spending years making sure other people could hear it plainly too, in the words they used at the market.

That is not a footnote in somebody's history. That is what God has been doing since Moses stood on the edge of that land and said: it is in your mouth.