He Knoweth Our Frame

Forty times, roughly. He has not counted but forty is not an exaggeration.

Three lines. Two of them are fine. The third one is the one, and he has read that third line at half past six in the morning, and in the car, and at his desk with the door shut, and twice standing up in the kitchen while the kettle boiled, and just now in a dark room with the lamp on.

It does not change. That is the thing he cannot get past. He keeps going back as though a fortieth reading might yield something the first thirty nine did not, and it never does, and he goes back anyway.

What is he looking for. He has asked himself and the honest answer is embarrassing. He is looking for a reading of it that lets him be alright.

And there are two versions in his head. One where the person meant it lightly and it is nothing. One where it is the visible corner of a much larger opinion about him that has been held for some time by several people.

He cannot tell which is true. He will never be able to tell. And so he goes back, at half past six, and the ground gets a little softer each time.

He is fifty eight and he thought this would have stopped by now.

You may know that third line. Something you have read into the ground looking for a version of it that lets you rest, and a private disbelief that at your age you are still doing this.

He knows what we are made of

Here is a verse about God's own knowledge of us, and the tone of it is what matters.

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

He knows our frame. He knows what we are built out of, what we can bear, where we are thin. And the reason that verse is in the psalm is given in the line before it: it is why He has compassion.

Read it again and notice that it is not a rebuke. There is no disappointment in that sentence. It is the tenderest possible way of saying that God is not surprised by you.

You are fully known by God, including the part of you that has read one line forty times. Psalm 103:14 makes His knowledge of our frame the reason for His pity rather than the grounds for His disappointment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man of fifty eight hear that without hearing a criticism inside it.

Now let me name what the rereading actually is, because it is worth understanding rather than being ashamed of.

You are not analyzing. You have not been analyzing since about the fourth reading. What you are doing is looking for a verdict you can live with, from a text that does not contain one, written by a person who is not thinking about you at all.

The line cannot tell you whether you are alright. It was never able to. It is three sentences about a piece of work and you have been asking it to settle a question about a man.

You are alright on ground that has nothing to do with what that person meant. The written word says He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is the one who settles a question that no amount of rereading was ever going to settle.

I want to be careful here, because I am not telling you the feedback does not matter. It might be right. If it is right you will do something about it and be better, and that is a good outcome and I am not going to talk you out of caring about your work.

But the doing something about it takes about twenty minutes. It does not take forty readings and a fortnight. Everything past the first three readings has not been about the work at all.

The honest half: you may never know what they meant. That is genuinely possible and it is uncomfortable and I am not going to pretend it is not. Most remarks in this life are never fully explained.

And there is a part only you can do, and it is physical, because this has become a habit of the hands as much as the mind. Read it once more, out loud, and then put it out of sight, and say one sentence, and let the sentence be the last thing said about it tonight.