He Argues With God in Spanish

It is a little after eleven and everybody else in the house has gone up.

He is at the sink with the water too hot, which he likes, and a dish towel over his shoulder, and he has been scrubbing the same pot for about four minutes. The pot was clean at the end of the first minute. He knows that. He is still going.

The window over the sink is black at this hour, so it is not a window, it is a mirror, and he is standing there looking at a man in a mirror scrubbing a clean pot.

And here is the thing about him that nobody at his church knows.

He prays in English. He has prayed in English for twenty years. English is the language of the prayer meeting and the small group and the grace before the meal, and it is polite, and it is careful, and it has words in it like sovereign and provision and season.

He argues in Spanish.

It started about three weeks ago and it has been happening at this sink most nights since. It is not prayer. He would not call it prayer. It comes out of him the way things came out of the men in his family at a kitchen table when somebody had been wronged, low and fast and completely unedited, and it is aimed straight up at the ceiling.

He says a sentence about God that he would never write down anywhere.

Then he stops. He stands there with the water running. He apologizes.

Then he says it again, differently, because the first one was not accurate enough.

And after that he stands with both hands on the edge of the sink and he is genuinely frightened, and not about the thing that happened to him three weeks ago. He is frightened about what a man becomes when this is what comes out of him. He has been in church his whole life. He knows what he sounds like.

He rinses the pot and puts it on the rack and turns the light off and goes up.

You know this sink. Maybe it is a car with the engine off in a driveway. Maybe it is a shower. Maybe you have no second language at all, but there is still a version of your voice that only comes out when there is nobody in the room, and it does not sound anything like the way you pray in front of people. Somewhere in the last few weeks the polite language stopped being able to hold what you actually have to say to God.

Hear me first, and hear it plainly. I am not going to correct you. Not tonight, not on this page. I am not going to defend God from you, because He has not asked me to and He does not need it, and a man who needs defending is not the One you are shouting at anyway.

I am also not going to tell you why this happened to you. I do not know. Nobody who has told you does either.

Put the pot down. Leave the water running if you want. I am going to show you something.

Somebody put that sentence in the Bible

There is a man in Scripture who said what you said tonight, and it did not get edited out.

Also when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer.Lamentations 3:8

Read that again slowly. That is not the villain of the book. That is not a quotation of the wicked, set up to be knocked down three verses later. That is the man of the poem, the faithful one, the one whose words the people were meant to sing, saying to God, out loud, in writing, in the sacred text: I am shouting and the door is shut.

Nobody softened it. Nobody put a note under it. It is still there tonight, in every Bible in your house, exactly as he said it.

You are not the first man to say that sentence, and you were not the first one to be kept while saying it. That is not my opinion about your kitchen: Lamentations 3:8 stands in the canon without an apology attached to it, and it is the Holy Spirit who carried that line into Scripture rather than out of it, which tells you what He thinks a person is allowed to bring.

And it does not stop there. A few lines on he says God has hedged him in and made his chain heavy. He compares Him to a bear lying in wait. This is the same poem, the same mouth, the same night.

You have not invented a new category of sin tonight, and you were not disqualified by any of the three weeks behind you. What is written kept a man's rawest accusation inside the book instead of deleting it, and the Spirit of God, who inspired every line of it, did not flinch at the one you just said over a sink.

Now hold on, because there is something else in that same chapter and I am going to handle it carefully.

Fourteen verses further down, the same man writes that God's compassions fail not, that they are new every morning, that great is His faithfulness. People love that line. They put it on things.

What almost nobody says out loud is where it lives. It lives in the same poem as the bear and the chain and the shut door, in the same handwriting, and neither line cancels the other. The book did not make him take the accusation back before it would let him say the other thing.

You are allowed to hold both of those in one mouth, and you were never asked to retract the first before you were permitted the second. Lamentations 3:22 to 23 sits in the same poem as verse 8 with nothing crossed out between them, and it is His Spirit who holds a man steady enough to carry two true things that do not agree yet.

The language you actually think in

I want to say something about the two languages, because I know both sides of this.

The polite one is not fake. Let me be clear. The careful prayer, the one with sovereign in it, that is a real thing and it is not hypocrisy. It is what a man reaches for when he is with people, and it has held plenty of weight over the years.

But it cannot hold this. That is not a failure of your faith and it is not a failure of the language. It is that some things only exist in the first language, and grief is one of them, and so is fury.

And here is the thing about the One it is aimed at. He does not need the translation.

You are heard in the language you actually think in, and you were heard three weeks ago on the first night it came out of you. Scripture records the man of Lamentations complaining in his own idiom rather than in a liturgy, and the same Spirit who is called the one who makes intercession with groanings that have no words at all is in your kitchen at eleven, doing exactly that.

You have not been talking to an empty ceiling, and you were not shouting into a room He had left. What is written puts the complaint inside the prayer book of a whole people, which is a strange place to file something God refuses to hear, and His Spirit is the one who carries a sentence upward that a man would not put on paper.