The Word I Kept Behind My Teeth

Ten to eight on a Thursday, and the tube over the returns desk is ticking the way it has ticked for as long as he has volunteered there, and there are four minutes of the evening left.

She comes up with three large print westerns, which is what she always brings, because she has been coming on Thursdays since the winter. He knows the shape of her handwriting on the card and almost nothing else about her.

Then she does not go. She turns the card over once, and again, and says to the desk rather than to him that her sister goes in on Monday. And then she looks up.

Something rises in him. Not a voice, nothing dramatic. A pressure, low and unmistakable, the way a word rises before it is quite a word yet. He knows what it is. It has happened to him before and he has never once let it out.

He stamps the book. He says, "That is you due back on the twenty eighth." She says thank you, and the door does what the door does, and the security light comes on over the car park as she crosses it.

She never came back. He does not know why and he never will. He has gone over those four minutes so many times that they have worn smooth, like the middle of a step.

And you know exactly what I am describing, because you have your own version of it, and yours has a room in it and an hour in it and a face in it.

Who made the mouth

Let me say the true thing about what you are carrying, because you have never quite said it out loud and I would rather it was said. Scripture supplies the written ground, and the Holy Spirit keeps this truth under Christ’s authority.

It is not guilt. Guilt is loud and it wants something from you. This is quieter. It is a verdict you passed on yourself in a corridor or a kitchen or at a returns desk, and it has been in force ever since: I am the kind of person who does not say things. You did not argue with it. You filed it. And every time since, when something has risen in you, that verdict has arrived first, and it has never once needed to raise its voice.

Underneath the verdict there is a second weight, heavier and much less fair. You believe she went without. You believe there was something in your hands for her, and you kept it, and she walked out into the car park lighter than she should have been. That is the one with teeth in it, and we are coming back to it, because that is the one that has to go.

Start where Scripture starts, which is not with your nerve.

There is a man at a burning bush being handed the largest assignment in the Old Testament, and his objection is not theological. He gets to the real one on the fourth attempt, and it is his mouth. I am not eloquent, he says. I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. He is saying the same sentence you said to yourself at ten to eight on a Thursday.

And God does not argue with the self assessment. He does not tell Moses that he is better than he thinks. He asks a question about who manufactured the thing.

And the LORD said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.Exodus 4:11-12

Read the promise slowly, because it is smaller and better than the one we usually go looking for.

He does not upgrade the mouth. There is no verse anywhere in which Moses becomes eloquent. The slowness stays exactly where it is for the rest of his life. What God says is I will be with thy mouth, and that is a promise about proximity, not about ability. He does not hand out a talent for speaking. He comes and stands at the mouth He already made.

And that is what makes this a present tense thing for you rather than an ancient one. Jesus told His friends not to rehearse what they would say when they were put on the spot, because the Holy Spirit teaches a person in that very hour the words that are needed. Not the night before. In the hour. So the hour you have been dreading is the exact hour the help was promised for, and the reason the help has never felt available is that you have been trying to feel ready ahead of the hour instead of helped inside it.

Now the second weight, and I want to be plain, because it has done more damage than the first.

She was not left without.

You have quietly believed that the God who arranged for her to be standing at your desk had no other way of reaching her, and that the whole thing came down to whether a tired volunteer could get six words out at closing time. That is not how heaven works and it never has been. He is not short of couriers. He was not held up. Nothing was lost to her that night. Scripture supplies the written ground, and the Holy Spirit keeps this truth under Christ’s authority.

Something was lost to you, and it is worth naming honestly rather than dressing it up. You were carrying something small and warm and you did not get to hand it over. That is a grief. It is not a debt. Scripture supplies the written ground, and the Holy Spirit keeps this truth under Christ’s authority.

And notice what the word actually was, because we make it enormous in the retelling. It was not a prophecy. You were never going to announce anything over a stranger at a returns desk. At most it was I am sorry, and what is her name, and I will pray for her on Monday. Small enough to be kind. Small enough for her to decline without embarrassment. The words that haunt people are almost never grand ones. They are ordinary, and that is precisely why not saying them stings for years. Scripture supplies the written ground, and the Holy Spirit keeps this truth under Christ’s authority.