Not Made of the Same Thing

The car park is empty except for three trolleys nested by the bollards and a van at the far end that has been there since before they arrived.

"Mirror. Then handbrake. Then bite. Feel for it. You will know it when the front of the car goes heavy."

She hears her own voice say it and something in her chest goes sideways, because those are not her words. They are his words. That is his exact sentence, in his exact order, including the front of the car goes heavy, which is not how anybody else on earth describes a clutch. He said it to her in a car park much like this one when she was seventeen, and she has said it to her daughter three Sundays running without once noticing where it came from.

Four months ago it came out about him. She is not going to go into it and neither am I. It is enough to say that the man who taught her to drive, and who stood up at her wedding and made three hundred people laugh, was not who any of them thought he was.

Her daughter stalls it, laughs, restarts. The morning is bright and ordinary. And the mother sitting in the passenger seat is quietly working out how she is supposed to keep saying good sentences that came out of a bad mouth.

You have your own version of that car park. Somebody's phrases are in you, or their handwriting is in a book on your shelf, or you still do a thing a certain way because they showed you, and every one of those is now a small live wire. And the part you cannot say to anybody is that it did not only cost you him. It cost you the instrument. You used to be able to tell.

What actually broke

Let me name the real damage, because the people around you keep naming the wrong one and it is why their comfort slides off.

They think a person was lost. One was, and that is real, and it would be enough on its own. But that is not the thing keeping anybody up at night. What broke is the apparatus. The internal instrument that has run quietly your whole life, working out who is safe and never asking for anything in return, has been proved wrong at maximum volume on the person it was most confident about. And an instrument that was wrong about him could be wrong about anybody, which means it is now wrong about everybody, which means the checking has spread to people known for thirty years.

Nobody should tell you that you ought to have seen it. You should not have. He was built so that you would not, and the fact that you did not is not a defect in you. That is what deception is for and it is what makes it a sin against you rather than a failure of yours.

You are not standing in the wreckage of your own judgement, and nothing that came out four months ago was a verdict on your ability to know anything. Scripture puts deceit squarely on the deceiver and never once on the person it was aimed at, and the Holy Spirit in you is not the faculty that was fooled; He is the one who is with you now that it has been.

And now the question underneath the question, the one you have not put into words because it feels disloyal to even ask: if I could be that wrong about him, how am I supposed to be sure about God?

Here is the answer, and it is not a reassurance. It is a difference of category.

God is not man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change His mind.Numbers 23:19

That verse is not saying God has a very good record. It is saying He is not made of the same material. A lie needs a gap. It needs a distance between what a person is and what a person presents, a space where one thing is kept and another thing is shown, and every deceived person in the world has been hurt in exactly that gap. In God there is no gap. There is no back room, no private self, no version of Him you have not met, nothing being held out of view until it comes out four months later.

You are dealing with a God who has no hidden side, and there is nothing about Him waiting to be discovered that would change what you know. That is what the written word means when it says He cannot deny Himself, and the Holy Spirit whom He gave you is called the Spirit of truth precisely because that is the substance He is made of.

Trusting Him is not the same act as trusting a person

Here is the second thing, and it is what makes today possible rather than some later month.

When you trusted that man, the act was something quite specific: a judgement, made on limited information, about an interior nobody could see. That is what trusting a human being is, always, and it is why it can be defeated. Nobody can see inside a person. Everybody is trusting a surface and hoping.

Trusting God is a different act. You are not making a guess about an interior you cannot see. You are agreeing with what He has said about Himself, which He has said openly, in writing, in public, and then demonstrated by dying for people who were not on His side. There is no unseen interior to be wrong about. The instrument that failed you is not the instrument this requires.

You have been given the ability to trust God with the exact part of you that broke here, and you can hand Him that part without first repairing it. Scripture never asks a wounded person to arrive intact, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the mending, on His own timing and not on a schedule anybody can hurry.

So there is something to say, and this is the part I want you actually to do, because the alternative is another four months of saying it to nobody.

Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Said. And you have a sentence in you that has never once been spoken at full strength, because every time you have said any of it out loud you have softened it for whoever was listening. Say the unsoftened one. Not to a person. To God, who is the only one in the situation who will not need protecting from it.

You have real authority to bring the true sentence to God, and it comes from being seated with Christ rather than from being composed enough to say it nicely. The word gives you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries it; the sentence does not have to be fair, gracious or finished.

If these four months have taken you somewhere darker, if there are hours when being here at all is too much, please tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. And if there is anybody in this who is not safe, you owe them no contact whatsoever. Getting help and keeping your distance are both good things and God is in both of them.