No Way To Tell It Well

Marlene has tried to tell it about six different ways and every single one of them makes her sound like a fool.

That is the problem, and it is not the loss. The loss is done and she has more or less stopped arguing with it. The thing that keeps her awake is that there is no version of the story that does not end with a listener thinking, kindly and silently, oh Marlene.

She has tried starting at the beginning. Too long, and by the middle they have already decided.

She has tried starting at the end and working back. Worse, because then the whole thing sounds like an excuse being constructed in front of them.

She has tried the very short version, and the short version is the one that makes her sound most foolish of all, because everything that made it reasonable at the time is exactly what gets cut for length.

That is the trap and it is a real one. The details that would explain her are the details that make it too long to tell, and the version people have time for is the version that indicts her.

So she has stopped telling it, and she has become a woman with a thing about herself that she carries around in a form nobody has ever heard.

Now hear me before anything else, and I mean this.

I am not going to ask you to tell it. Not here, not on this page, not in any form. I do not want the long version or the short one, and there is no point in this article where you have to explain yourself to anybody, including to me.

And I am not going to tell you it was not foolish. I do not know. That is the honest answer and I would rather give you an honest one than a comfortable one, because if I told you cheerfully that it was not, and it was, you would stop trusting me by the end of the paragraph and rightly so.

Here is what I can tell you instead, and it is better than the thing I am refusing to say.

It does not turn on that. The entire arrangement between you and God does not have a clause in it about whether you were foolish, and that is not me being nice, it is the actual structure of the thing, and I can show you where it is written.

You have your own version. There is something you cannot tell in a way that survives the telling, and you have run out of ways to try.

The verse says He knows what we are made of

There is a line in Psalm 103 that people quote as tenderness, and it is tenderness, and it is also a statement about design.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

He knoweth our frame. Frame is a construction word. It is what a thing is built out of, its material, and the point being made is that God has never once been under a misapprehension about the capabilities of the people He made.

He is not disappointed in the way a person is disappointed. Disappointment requires an expectation that has been let down, and He formed the material Himself and knows exactly what it does under pressure and at speed and after four bad months.

He remembereth. Which means He does not forget it and then have to be reminded when somebody makes a mess.

And now hear what is already true over you. You have never once surprised Him. That is not my kindness: the written word says He knows the frame and remembers the dust, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who has been rehearsing six versions of a story.

And He is not waiting to hear your account before deciding about you. The word says as far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us, and that is stated as a completed action rather than as a policy under review, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this is your position rather than an aspiration.

Your welcome was never priced

This is what this whole category exists to say, and this is the article that needs the sharpest version of it.

Nothing about how you are received depends on what is in your hands or on how well the story tells.

And it does not depend on whether it was foolish. That is the specific thing and it deserves a specific answer. The word says while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, and yet sinners is a much stronger word than foolish, and it is the condition the arrangement was made in and for, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a fact under a person's feet rather than a doctrine in a book.

And your standing did not move. Not down: the word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast, and every clause is shutting a door on the idea that anybody's position was ever earned by getting things right.

If it had been earned by getting things right, then getting something wrong could unearn it. It was not, so it cannot.