Both of Them Are You

The photograph takes eleven minutes.

The Bible is open, obviously, and the coffee is in the good mug, and there is a corner of a blanket in the frame because a corner of blanket is warmth. The light from the window is doing something lovely at about half past seven and will not be doing it at eight. You move the mug once. You move it back. You turn the Bible slightly, because a page photographs better at an angle, and you notice that the page it fell open at is a genealogy, so you turn to something with a bit more poetry in it, which is not dishonest, it is art direction.

Then the caption.

The caption is written, and read back, and deleted. It is written again shorter. The word "just" comes out, because "just sitting with this today" sounded humble in your head and looks like a costume on the screen. A verse reference goes in. The verse reference comes out again, in case it looks like showing off. Version four is nine words long and took longer than the photograph did.

And then you post it, or you do not, and either way somebody from church replies with three raised hands and a heart, and it is genuinely kind of her, and you feel a small warm thing and a small other thing at the same time and you could not name the second one under oath.

Now. Nothing about that is a lie. Let us have that clear before we go anywhere near the tender part. You did read the passage. The coffee was real and it went cold. That verse did actually help you at a quarter to eight in the morning, and wanting to hand somebody else something good is not vanity, it is one of the kindest instincts a person has.

The trouble is not the photograph.

The trouble is that at twenty to five on Tuesday there is another version of you in a car park with the engine off, who said something short and unkind to somebody in the kitchen and has not gone back to sort it out. Who prayed for forty seconds, and thirty of them were a list. Who turned the podcast off, not because it was boring, but because it had started asking for something. Who has read the same eight verses for a fortnight because sitting still with the ninth would mean feeling it.

And here is the thing nobody says out loud.

Both of them are you.

Not the good one and the fake one. Not the real one and the fraud. Both of them are genuinely, entirely you, and the ache is not that they exist. It is that somewhere along the way they stopped speaking to each other, and the one holding the phone has been doing all the talking about God, and the one in the car park has been doing all the living with Him, and neither of them is telling the other anything at all.

The gap is not the sin. The silence across it is the loneliness

Somebody needs to say the kind thing first, so I will.

A gap is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a costume worn to deceive, and this is nothing like that. This is a person who genuinely believes what she posted, and who is genuinely tired on Tuesday, and the distance between those two facts is not a moral crime, it is just distance. Everybody has some. The saints had some. The difference between a walk that breathes and a walk that goes stale is almost never the size of the gap. It is whether anything is being said across it.

Because here is what actually happens when the two halves stop talking. God gets the version with the caption. Not deliberately. Not cynically. It is just that praying becomes a thing you do with the same voice you write in, and that voice has been trained for years to sound settled, so the prayers come out settled, and the Tuesday goes unmentioned, and the one part of you that most needed company sits in the car with the engine off, on its own.

That is the loneliness. Not the gap. The quiet.

You are already completely known by the One you keep drafting for. Scripture says He knows your downsitting and your uprising and understands your thought while it is still a long way off, which means the version He is answering has never been the edited one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land as relief rather than as exposure.

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.Psalm 51:6

That line was written by a man whose public life and private life had come apart at a scale none of us will ever manage. And look what he says God wants. Not a better performance. Not more consistency by Friday. Truth in the inward parts, in the hidden part, in the room nobody photographs.

You were given that hidden room as the place He teaches, not as the place He inspects. Psalm 51:6 does not say the hidden part is where you will be found out, it says it is where He will make you to know wisdom, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the teaching in there, at twenty to five, with nobody watching.

He has been reading the Tuesday all along

There is an old line about a prophet sent to anoint a king, sizing up a row of strong young men, and being told to stop looking at the outsides.

Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.1 Samuel 16:7

That verse gets used as a warning. It is not a warning. It is the single most restful sentence available to a person who has been maintaining a front and cannot remember when it started.

You have never once been assessed by God on your best photograph. It is written that people look at the outward appearance and the Lord looks at the heart, so the eleven minutes of art direction were never the exhibit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reaches past the whole display to the person actually standing behind it.

And He is not shocked by what He finds there. This is the part that undoes people.

You have a God who knows exactly what you are made of and has never revised His opinion downward. Scripture says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is not an insult, it is a Father saying he has factored it in already, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a car park where somebody is sitting in the dark being disappointed in herself.

I am not going to tell you to post less. That is not the subject and it never was. Some of the most honest people I know are wonderfully public about their faith, and some of the most closed off people I know have never posted a word in their lives. The platform is not the problem. The silence is.

You are not two people, however many rooms you have been keeping. Scripture says that if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and fellowship is what happens when nothing is being held back at the door, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walks a divided heart back into one piece.