Not Your Fault, And It Feels Exactly Like It Was

Everybody has told Merle it was not his fault, and every one of them was right, and it has not made one bit of difference.

They have been kind about it. That is not a complaint; the whole road has been kind. Two of them sat in his kitchen and went through it with him line by line, out loud, and both of them independently arrived at the same place, which is that there was nothing there for him to have done differently.

He agrees with them. That is the part people find hard to believe.

He is not arguing. He is not secretly convinced he missed something. He has been over it more times than either of those men and he has come to the same conclusion, and he would tell you flatly and without any performance that he does not think he could have prevented it.

And it feels exactly like he could have.

That is the whole of it. The feeling has not consulted the facts. It never does. It sits in his chest at about four in the morning and it does not present an argument, because an argument could be answered, and this does not argue. It simply is there, the way weather is there, and every reasonable thing anybody has said to him has gone past it without touching it.

He gave up explaining that to people about three months ago, because it makes them uncomfortable and then they try harder, and trying harder does not work either.

Now I want to be plain with you before we go anywhere near a verse.

I am not going to tell you it was not your fault. That is not because I think it was. It is because that sentence has been said to you already, probably many times, by people who love you, and it did not work, and me repeating it in writing is not going to be the time it finally lands.

And I am not going to ask you what happened. Not once on this page. Whether there was something you did or nothing you did or a thing you could not have known, none of it changes a word of what I have to say to you, and there is no point here where you have to account for anything.

And nobody here is going to tell you this was God teaching you something. I do not know that, nobody does, and that sentence has done a great deal of damage to good people at exactly this point in the story.

You have your own version. There is a thing that was not your doing, and it sits on you as though it was, and you have stopped mentioning that to anybody because of what happens when you do.

God does not open with the cause

There is a verse in Isaiah spoken to people whose situation was, by any measure, a catastrophe, and the striking thing is what it does not do.

Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.Isaiah 43:1

There is no diagnosis in it. There is no paragraph about how they got there and there is no assignment of responsibility, and the people it was said to had a long and complicated history that anybody could have written up if they had wanted to.

He does not want to. He opens with ownership.

I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. Three clauses, all of them about relationship, none of them about cause, and every verb in the past or the present rather than in the conditional.

That is not God avoiding the subject. It is God ranking it. The cause is simply not the first thing about a person, and He goes to what is first.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are His, and that was not affected by the thing that happened. That is not my kindness: the written word puts thou art mine in the present tense with no conditions attached in that sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man at four in the morning.

And you are called by your name and not by the event. The word says I have called thee by thy name, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, which is what you are called, and nobody in heaven refers to you by what happened.

Your welcome was never priced

Here is the thing this whole set of messages exists to put in front of you.

Nothing about how you are received has ever depended on what is in your hands, or on whose fault it was.

Both halves of that matter here, and the second half is the one for a man in your position. There is no accounting stage. There is no point at which a determination has to be reached before you are met, and the running father in Luke does not wait for one, and there is no scene anywhere in Scripture where somebody is held at the door pending an investigation.

And your standing has not moved. Not down: the word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, and the Spirit is the one who makes that hold firm in a body that has had the ground taken out from under it.

And the feeling at four in the morning is not a verdict. It is a feeling, and God does not read verdicts off a man's chest at four in the morning. The word says if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a place a man can actually stand, which is the only reason to say it at all.

Greater than our heart. That is the sentence. Your heart is saying something and it is loud and it is wrong, and the word does not tell you to argue with it. It tells you there is somebody bigger in the room.