Into The Depths Of The Sea

He did everything you are supposed to do.

He owned it immediately, which is harder than people think when the instinct is to explain first. He apologized to the two people it landed on, separately, without qualifying anything. He fixed what could be fixed and he was honest about what could not. He did not go quiet on anybody afterward, which is the thing most people do.

He would tell you, and he is right, that if a friend came to him having done exactly this and handled it exactly this way, he would tell them it was over.

It is not over.

Eight months. It turns up when he is tired and it turns up when he is not, and there is no pattern he has been able to find, and it produces a specific physical thing in his chest that arrives before the memory does.

What makes it strange is that there is nothing outstanding. He has looked for something to do about it, because doing something is what he knows how to do, and there is nothing left. The people are fine with him. There is no restitution outstanding, no conversation unhad.

He has run out of actions and the thing is still there, and he has started to wonder whether that means it is not actually forgiven, and whether the feeling is information.

You may know that wall. Everything done properly and the weight not lifting, and a growing theory that the weight itself is telling you something.

Where He put it

Here is a verse about what God does with sin, and the physical picture in it is deliberate.

He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.Micah 7:19

Into the depths of the sea.

The prophet could have said forgiven. He could have said forgotten, or covered, or set aside. He picks a location, and the location he picks is the one place in the ancient world from which nothing was ever recovered.

Nobody dives to the depths. There is no expedition. It is not that God is choosing not to look at it. It is somewhere that has no retrieval.

And notice the verb before it: subdue our iniquities. That is the language of something being held down and overpowered rather than negotiated with.

You are standing over water that has something in it which cannot be brought back up. Micah 7:19 puts the sins in the depths of the sea rather than merely out of sight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man believe a location he cannot inspect.

Now let me deal with the theory, because the theory is the actual problem.

You have started to think the feeling is information. That the weight is a reading, and that if the weight is still there then something is still outstanding. That is a completely reasonable inference and it is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that will never correct itself, because there is no evidence that could disprove it. A feeling that is treated as evidence about forgiveness will always be evidence, whatever it does.

The feeling is a feeling. It is a real one and I am not dismissing it, and it is not a report on your standing.

You are forgiven on the basis of what God did with it rather than on the basis of how it feels eight months later. The written word names a disposal from which nothing returns, and the Holy Spirit is not the one producing a weight in your chest as a message.

The honest half. I am not going to tell you it was not your fault. It was, and you have never claimed otherwise, and that honesty is part of why you have handled this well.

And I am not going to tell you that God arranged it in order to teach you something. He did not. That idea gets offered often and it is a cruel one, and it turns your own failure into somebody else's teaching method.

There is a part only you can do, and it is a naming rather than an action, which is exactly why it has been hard for a man who solves things by doing. You say it once. And then you say where it is.