The Thing You Have Never Said Out Loud

It happened in a van, in a car park, behind a shop that sells tiles.

Ephraim had pulled in there because he had twenty minutes and nowhere to be, and he was praying the way a man prays when he has been praying badly for months, which is to say he was mostly just sitting there with the engine off. And then something happened.

I am not going to tell you what. That is deliberate, and I will come back to why.

Whatever it was, it lasted a few minutes, and it was not a mood, and it was not the radio, and it was not tiredness, and he has gone over every one of those explanations in the nine years since and none of them fit. He drove home. He ate his dinner. He said nothing.

He has said nothing since.

Not because it was shameful. Because of the arithmetic. There are two rooms he could tell it in, and he has known for a long time what each of them would do with it.

The first room would be delighted. They would want him to say it at the front. They would ask him to do it again, on a Sunday, with the lights up, and they would want to know whether it came with anything else. And the thing that happened in that van was not a performance and he cannot repeat it and he would not know where to start.

The second room would be kind about it. They would nod, and use the word powerful, and gently give him three natural explanations he had already thought of, and by the end of the conversation the whole thing would be smaller than it was, and he would have handed over something he could not get back.

So he has kept it in a locked box for nine years, and every year the box has got a little heavier, and now the not-saying has become its own weight, entirely separate from the thing itself.

You have a box. I know you do, because people who do not have one do not read to the end of a paragraph like that one.

Yours might be older than nine years. Yours might have happened in a kitchen, or halfway up a stairwell, or in a hospital corridor at four in the morning, or in a field. And you have run the same arithmetic and come to the same conclusion, and you have never once said it out loud in your life.

She kept them and she pondered them

Before the teaching, hear where you stand. You are not a person carrying a thing too strange to be held. Luke 2 says Mary treasured these things and turned them over in her heart, and the Spirit never once required an explanation before He would give something.

There is a woman in Luke's account who had more happen to her in one week than most people carry in a lifetime, and there is one sentence about what she did with it.

But Mary kept all these words, turning them over in her heart.Luke 2:19

Look at the verbs, because both of them are doing something you have been told you were not allowed to do.

She kept them. She did not publish them. The shepherds went off telling everybody, and Luke says so plainly, and the telling was right for them. She did something different in the same room on the same night. She held on to it.

And she turned them over. That is the second verb and it is the one that lifts the weight off you. She did not understand it. She was not sitting there with the whole thing filed and explained. She was turning it over, which is what a person does with something that will not go flat, for years, and it is written down as a good thing and not as a failure.

Nobody in that account asks Mary to demonstrate anything. Nobody asks her to account for herself. She is not required to produce a doctrine of what happened to her before she is allowed to have had it happen.

Now here is why I did not tell you what happened in the van.

Because the moment I do, this stops being about you. You start measuring your thing against his thing. If yours was bigger you feel proud, and if yours was smaller you feel cheated, and either way the box stays shut, because now there is a scale on it. There is no scale. There has never been a scale. God gave Himself to a person in a car park behind a shop that sells tiles, and He did not check first whether it would compare well.

That is this whole tradition's oldest memory, and it is worth saying out loud. It started in a building nobody respected, through a man nobody had credentialed, and what stunned the people who came to look was not the sound in the room. It was who was in the room, together, on the same floor. He has always poured Himself out across the line other people were guarding. A rented hall. A stable. A van.

So the two rooms you have been afraid of are both asking you the wrong question. One asks you to perform it. The other asks you to explain it. And you cannot do either, and you have concluded from that that you must hide it.

You do not have to hide it. You have to keep it, which is a different thing entirely, and it is what Mary did, and it is what you have actually been doing all along without knowing it had a name.

Hiding is a thing you do because you are ashamed. Keeping is a thing you do because it is precious. Same locked box, and the difference between them is the whole of your Tuesday.

And you have not done anything wrong with it. The word gives a woman years of turning a thing over privately and calls it treasuring rather than hiding, and the Spirit who gave it is not waiting on your vocabulary.