The Story You Could Tell in Your Sleep

The river is browner than anybody expected, and somebody's toddler has found his way down the bank to the mud, which is now everybody's problem.

There are about fifty of them up on the grass. Camp chairs, a cool box, and a carrier bag with eleven towels in it because nobody could agree on how many would be needed. Three people are going in this afternoon: two lads from the back row who have been elbowing each other since they arrived, and a grandmother in a long denim skirt who has been waiting on this longer than most of the bank has been alive. The water is colder than any of them think it is. It always is.

And before the first one goes in, somebody up on the grass says the thing they always say.

"Tell them yours."

So he tells it. Four minutes, stood in the shallows with his boots off and his trousers rolled. The same story he has told at every one of these for fifteen years: how it started, what it cost, the bit about the fence post and the dog, which is where the laugh comes, and it comes exactly where it always comes. Somebody wipes their eyes at the place where somebody always wipes their eyes. Every word of it is true. He has never embellished a line of it in his life.

Then he stands there with the towels over his arm while the first lad goes under, and the thought arrives uninvited, the way it always does.

That story is fifteen years old.

You have a four minute version too.

Yours might be shorter. Yours might not have a laugh in it. But you know its shape and you know where it lands, and every word of it is honest, and it is finished. And nobody standing on that bank knows the first thing about the stretch you are in right now, the one with no shape to it yet and no line that lands anywhere. And here is what has been sitting quietly under your ribs all afternoon: you have been giving God the four minute version too. Not because He cannot see the rest of it. Because somewhere along the way the telling and the talking became the same thing, and it was never a decision. It was a groove.

The second lad goes under and comes up shouting, and the whole bank cheers, and you cheer with them.

Nobody actually knows what to say

Let me set the weight down first, because you have been carrying it a long while without a name for it, and a thing with no name is always heavier than a thing with one.

And you are already fully known, in both voices. Psalm 139:1 says O Lord, Thou hast searched me, and known me, and the searching is finished tense rather than pending, and the Spirit is the one who makes being known feel like safety instead of exposure.

You are the one they ask to tell it. That is not nothing: people hand you the moment because they trust you with it, and you have never once let a room down. It is also the loneliest thing to be, for a reason that sounds absurd out loud. Nothing is wrong. There is no crisis. You have not fallen out with anybody, you have not stopped believing anything, and there is nothing you would need to confess to a soul. You are simply very good at a good thing, and being good at it is quietly what put the distance in. There is no way to complain about that either. Who would you tell? "I tell it well" is not a sentence anybody can say out loud without it sounding like a boast, so it stays in, and so does everything underneath it.

Here is the verse, and I want you to look at who is speaking in it.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

We. Not they. Not the new ones still finding their way round the book. Paul writes we, and he puts himself inside it: the man whose letters you have heard read aloud your whole life, standing in exactly the same not knowing as the rest of us, in the middle of the greatest letter he ever wrote.

And you have never once fooled Him with the polished version. Scripture says all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do, and the Spirit is the one who turns that from a threat into the end of a long performance.

Nobody actually knows what to say. That is not the private confession of a tired believer standing in a river in his rolled up trousers. It is the plain statement of the New Testament about all of us at once. Fluency was never the qualification, and the standard you have been quietly failing does not exist and never did.

Then look at what the verse does with that. It does not send you away to phrase it better. It puts Someone underneath the words: the Spirit Himself takes up what you cannot get into a sentence and carries it, groanings that never made it as far as your mouth. Read that again slowly. The thing you have been holding back because it was not good enough to say out loud is the exact thing He was given to carry.

And this is now. The Spirit was not lent to one generation and withdrawn once the letters were written. He was given, He has never been recalled, and He is doing this work today in kitchens and hospital corridors and on wet grass beside a bag of towels. You are not reading about a historical arrangement. You are standing in a live one.

It is also for you, personally, and not for believers in general. There is no such person as a believer in general; there has only ever been a particular man standing in cold water with his boots on the bank, and God has never dealt with anybody any other way. The Spirit is not interceding for the average of us. He is carrying what you could not say this afternoon.

Now hear the part I most want you to have, and hear it in the voice of a friend rather than a foreman. The gap between the two of you is not a scandal. It is not hypocrisy. There may be nothing hidden down there at all, no secret, nothing to uncover. That gap is usually tiredness plus competence, which is the least dramatic combination in the world and one of the loneliest, and it does not make you a fraud. It makes you somebody who has been useful for a long time.

And the four minute story is not a fake. Do not throw it away and do not go hunting for a reason to be ashamed of it. It is a genuine gift, it has carried people through hard afternoons, and God has been in every telling of it. The honest walk was never the finished story being replaced by the unfinished one. It is one person owning both, and both of them belonging to Him.

The psalm tells a whole crowd of people to pour their heart out in front of Him. Pour. Not present, not compose, not deliver. Nothing pours neatly. It was never supposed to.