He was told once, when he was fourteen, by an aunt, in a kitchen, and never again by anybody.
And at the end of the telling she said the sentence that has governed the whole thing for thirty-one years.
We do not talk about that.
It is a story about his grandmother. It happened before he was born and it is not a shameful story, which is the confusing part. Nobody did anything wrong in it. If anything, it is the opposite: it is the sort of account that, in another family, would have been polished and repeated and become the thing everybody knew about them.
In his family it went into a box.
He has worked out why, since. It is not complicated once you see it. The generation above him arrived somewhere new and were determined to be taken seriously, and a story like that was exactly the sort of thing that made people look at you a certain way, and so it went away, along with a few other things, and the going away was never discussed either.
Thirty-one years.
His own children do not know it. His wife of nineteen years does not know it. He has been, all this time, the only living person in that family under seventy who is carrying it, and he did not choose that and nobody handed it to him on purpose.
So let me ask you.
What did your family decide never to say again?
The psalm treats telling as a duty and not a risk
There is a psalm that opens by announcing what it is for, and what it is for is transmission.
We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, His power, and the wonders He has done.Psalm 78:4
Now, the ordinary reading of that is about teaching children the Scriptures, and that reading is right and I am not taking it away.
But look at the verb the psalmist chose to negate.
We will not hide them.
He does not say we will teach them. He says we will not hide them, which is a completely different sentence, because you only say we will not hide in a situation where hiding is the live option.
The psalm assumes that the natural gravity of a family is downward and inward. That things get kept. That a generation which has come through something has reasons, often good ones, for not passing it on, and that the passing on therefore has to be a decision rather than a default.
And notice what happens in the very next verses, because it is the part that will hold you.
The psalm goes straight on to tell the story of a generation that did not do this, and it is not a gentle passage. It describes people who forgot what God had done and had to relearn everything the hard way, and it names the mechanism plainly: they forgot because they were not told.
Hear where you stand, my friend, with thirty-one years in a box.
You are not the keeper of a family embarrassment. Scripture puts we will not hide them in the mouth of a whole community as a deliberate act, and the Spirit has never been served by a household deciding to be respectable.
And I want to speak gently about the generation above you, because they are not villains in this and I will not let them be made into any.
They were frightened, and they were frightened for good reasons, and they were trying to protect people they loved from being looked at a certain way in a place where being looked at a certain way had consequences. That rule was not made out of unbelief. It was made out of love, in a hard season, by people who were doing their best.
You can honor every one of them and still not keep the rule.
Those are not in conflict, and if you have felt for thirty-one years that breaking the silence would be a betrayal of your aunt, hear this clearly: she gave you the story. She did that on purpose. A woman who genuinely wanted a thing to die does not tell a fourteen-year-old.
The word says tell the next generation, and you have children.
And you are not the keeper of a family embarrassment. Psalm 78 goes straight on from that instruction to describe a generation who forgot what God had done because nobody told them, and it names the mechanism without softening one word of it, and the Holy Spirit has never been served by a household deciding to be respectable.
Here is where it breaks open, and it is about who the rule was for.
That rule was made in a particular place, in a particular decade, for a particular reason, by people who are mostly gone now.
It was never a commandment. Nobody in your family had the authority to bind a story for three generations, and if you put it that way to any of them they would have been horrified, because they were not trying to bind anything. They were getting through a Tuesday.
Say it once, out loud, to one person.
Psalm 78 says we will not hide them from their descendants and tell the next generation, and the psalmist chose the verb hide because hiding is the thing that happens by itself. The Holy Spirit Himself has never asked a family to be respectable.
Thirty-one years is long enough. You are the only one carrying it and you are allowed to set it down in front of somebody.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Rule, you were made by frightened people who loved us and you were never a commandment. Psalm 78 says we will not hide them from their descendants, and the psalmist chose the word hide because hiding is what happens on its own.
- Sentence at the end of the telling, you have bound one story for thirty-one years and you are not going any further than me. In the name of Jesus I stop you here, and the Holy Spirit has not once been served by a household deciding to be respectable.
- Lord, Psalm 78 says we will not hide them from their descendants, and Your Spirit has never been served by a household deciding to be respectable. I am saying it once tonight to one person or to nobody, and I can honor every one of them and still not keep the rule.
Psalm 78:4
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