When I Kept Silence

Nobody found out. That was four years ago and nobody found out and nobody ever will.

There was no harm done in the end. It could have caused harm and it did not, through a combination of circumstance and other people's competence, and by the time he understood the size of what he had nearly done it was already over and the moment for saying anything had passed.

He has thought about telling somebody. Often. And every time he gets to the same place, which is that telling would achieve nothing except transferring a weight from him to somebody else, and that this would be self indulgent, and that a man ought to be able to carry his own things.

Four years of a very reasonable argument.

And he has noticed some things about himself in those four years. He is more tired than he used to be. He is careful in conversations in a way that he was not, particularly conversations that go anywhere near that subject. He has become slightly less present with the people he loves, and if you asked him why he would say work.

He cannot tell whether the silence is discretion or concealment. Both would look exactly like this from inside.

You may have your own four years. Something nobody found out about, a reasonable argument for saying nothing, and a set of small changes in you that you have attributed to something else.

What the silence cost

Here is a man describing what happened in his body while he kept quiet, and the language is unusually physical.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer.Psalm 32:3-4

Bones waxing old. Roaring. A hand heavy on him. Drought.

That is not a description of guilt as an idea. It is a description of what silence does to a body over time, written by somebody who had been through it and had the vocabulary for it.

And then the turn.

I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.Psalm 32:5

I said. It is a speech act. Something that had been inside a man came out of his mouth to God.

And notice who it went to. Unto thee. Unto the LORD. There is no disclosure to a community described in that psalm and no requirement of one.

You are able to say the whole of it out loud to God, and the psalm asks for no other audience. Psalm 32:5 makes the acknowledging a speech act directed to the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man speak something he has held silently for four years without demanding he hand it to anybody else.

Now let me take your argument seriously, because it is a good argument and it is half right.

You are correct that telling somebody in order to feel lighter, when it would burden them and change nothing, is not automatically virtuous. That is a real consideration and people are told the opposite far too casually.

But look at what your argument was actually about. It was about telling a person. And you extended it, without noticing, into telling anybody at all, including God, and there was never any version of the reasoning that covered that.

Four years of not saying it out loud to anyone, including Him.

You are carrying something that has never once been spoken, and speaking it is available tonight. The written word describes what unspoken things do to a body and then answers with a sentence said to God, and the Holy Spirit is not asking for an audience.

The honest half. It may be that there is a person you should tell, and I cannot see your situation and I will not pretend to. If there is a wrong that could still be put right by telling somebody, that is a real question and you should take it to somebody wise who knows your circumstances.

And I am not going to tell you the near miss was providential or arranged. Other people's competence covered a thing you did. That is what happened.

There is a part only you can do tonight and it is the whole of what is being asked. Out loud. In full. To God. With nobody else in the room.