He Has the Whole Complaint by Heart

He is up at ten to five again, standing at the counter with a mug he has not filled, watching the kettle because watching the kettle is a thing to do.

The complaint is finished. That is the part nobody knows. It has been finished for about three weeks. It runs to maybe eleven sentences, and he has been over it so many times on the ring road, in the shower, at the lights by the retail park, that he could say it in his sleep. It has an opening line. It has a worst line, about two thirds of the way through, that he flinches at even when he is only thinking it.

He has never said one word of it out loud.

Not once. Not in the car with the radio off, not in the shed, not in the four minutes he sits in the church car park on a Sunday before he goes in and is fine at people. He kneels down at night, out of thirty years of habit, and what comes out of his mouth is a short, decent, tidy prayer about other people, and then he gets into bed.

Because he knows what happens if he says it. If he says it, it is in the room. If it is in the room, it is between them, and it is real, and it is a thing that has been said to God by him, and it cannot be taken back. Right now it is only in his head, which he has decided is a kind of safety.

The kettle clicks off. He does not fill the mug. He stands there with both hands on the edge of the counter, in the dark, at ten to five, being unbearably polite to God.

That is you. On the landing. In the car park. Kneeling at the side of the bed saying something about your sister's knee while the real sentence sits behind your teeth like a stone.

So before anything else, and I mean this exactly as it is written.

I am not going to correct your anger. Not one syllable of it. I am not going to explain to you why this happened, because I do not know, and I am not going to defend God to you as though He needed a lawyer in the room this morning.

And a question is not unbelief. It never has been. The man with no questions is not further along than you.

The Prayer That Was Never Tidied Up

Open the Psalms anywhere near the front and you find a man doing the exact opposite of what you did last night.

Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; for my bones are vexed. My soul is also sore vexed: but thou, O LORD, how long?Psalm 6:2-3

Look at how it starts. No throat clearing. No paragraph about God's greatness first to make what follows acceptable. He goes straight in with what is wrong with him and how long it has gone on.

And then look at how verse three ends, because this is the part I want you to hold. But thou, O LORD, how long? That is not a sentence. It stops. He starts to say something to God and it breaks in the middle, and it goes into the book like that, unfinished, three thousand years ago, and nobody has ever tidied it up since.

You have not shocked anybody, and there is no sentence forming in you tonight that is not already in Scripture in some form. That is not me being generous with the rules: Psalm 6 is in the canon in its raw state, and it is the Holy Spirit who put it there and kept it there, which is a decision somebody made on purpose about what a person is allowed to say to God.

Now the fear underneath the whole thing. You are not going to lose Him by saying it out loud, and the silence you are keeping is not what is protecting this. His word says nothing is hidden from His sight and all things are open before Him, which means He has had the eleven sentences since the day you wrote them, and the Spirit who searches the deep things of God did not need the confession in order to hear it.

Think about what saying it out loud actually does, then, since it does not inform Him. It does not make it real. It is already real. You are only deciding whether it is real with Him in the room or real with Him locked out of it. That is the whole difference, and what is written keeps putting the complaint inside the prayer rather than outside it, and the Spirit is the one who makes the difference between those two rooms.

Being Unbearably Polite to God

There is a kind of politeness that is really distance, and you have been practicing it at the side of the bed for eleven weeks.

I understand why. If you say the tidy prayer, the relationship stays formally intact. Nothing is risked. But something has gone out of it, and you can feel exactly what: you are being courteous to Someone you used to talk to. You have not been demoted from son to acquaintance, and no polite prayer of yours has ever fooled Him for a second. His word says we have received the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father, and cry there is not a decorous word, and the same Spirit is the one who put the cry in a man in the first place.

And this matters: the accusation you have composed is, in its own way, an act of faith. You are addressing Someone. A man does not spend eleven weeks composing a complaint against a God he thinks is absent, and Scripture is full of people who argued because they believed He was answerable, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a man arguing rather than walking off.

I am still not going to answer the question. I do not know why this happened to you. What I can tell you is where the psalm goes: not to an explanation. Nobody explains anything to David in Psalm 6. He is simply heard.