I Rehearse Conversations That Never Happen

You have written it about forty times now.

The opening line, which you have revised. The place it happens, which is usually the car, because the car is the only room in your life without eye contact in it.

You have written their objection and your answer to their objection. You have written the version where it goes well and the version where they get up and leave, and you have decided what you would do in both.

And you have never once said any of it.

Because the moment never arrives. There is always somebody else in the room, or they are on their way out, or it is a Tuesday and there is nothing wrong enough today to justify starting something that large.

So the conversation lives in your head, getting longer and more polished and further from anything a person could actually say out loud.

I am not going to give you a script for it. That is a technique and this is not a place that hands those out. And I am not going to tell you to just say it, because you have had that from somebody already and it did not account for a single one of the reasons you have not.

Groanings which cannot be uttered

There is a verse in Romans about prayer that turns out to be about anybody who cannot get the words out.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Romans 8:26, King James Version)

We know not what we should pray for as we ought.

That is written down as a normal condition rather than as a failure. Not knowing what to say, and not knowing how to say it properly, is described in Scripture as the ordinary human state, and the answer given to it is not a better vocabulary.

You are in a state the Scriptures name as normal, and not having the words has never once been the same as having nothing. Romans 8:26 says we know not what we should pray for as we ought, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a car where a conversation has been rewritten forty times.

And then the answer. The Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

Cannot be uttered. Not will not be, not should not be. Cannot. There is a category of thing that a person genuinely cannot get into words, and God's response to it is not to demand the words. It is to carry the thing Himself.

You have something being carried that you cannot say, and the carrying has never once waited for you to find a way to put it. It is written in Romans 8:26 that the intercession is made with groanings which cannot be uttered, and the Spirit of God is the one doing that work while a person drives home rehearsing.

What forty versions have done

Now let me name what the rehearsing is doing, because it began as love and it has quietly turned into something else.

The first version was a person trying to be careful. By the fifteenth version it had become a project, and by the fortieth it is a piece of theater that could not survive contact with a real evening.

And there is a second effect. A conversation that has been rehearsed forty times gets a weight attached to it, and by now the weight is so large that no ordinary Tuesday could carry it.

You are not obliged to deliver a speech, and the size it has grown to has never once been the size God requires. It is written in Romans 8:26 that the intercession happens in groanings which cannot be uttered, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the weight off a Tuesday that could not hold it.

Which means the rehearsing has made the conversation harder to have. That is not what anybody intended, and it is what has happened.

Romans 8:26 puts the unsaid thing into somebody else's hands rather than requiring it to be produced, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a script off a person who has been carrying it since March.

You are able to put that script down, and the not saying it has never once meant it went unheard. Romans 8:26 has the Spirit interceding with what cannot be uttered, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives the whole of a conversation that never happened.

And here is the plain thing, because months of this have become something about you.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about the parent driving that car.

It is somebody who loves a person very much and cannot find a door, which is a description of most parents of teenagers alive.

You have not failed to say something, and forty unspoken versions have never once been forty failures. The written word calls the wordlessness ordinary in Romans 8:26, and the Spirit of God is the one who declines to grade a person on the sentences they did not manage.

The real conversation will not be the rehearsed one

One more thing, because it will help when the day comes.

The conversation you eventually have will not resemble the one you wrote. It will start in the wrong place, at a bad moment, probably sideways, and probably about something adjacent.

That is how these things start in real houses. Almost nobody has ever had the conversation they planned, and the ones who did have usually got a performance back rather than a person.

You are not behind on anything, and the conversation you rehearsed has never once been the one that was going to open the door. Romans 8:26 has the Spirit working in the gap rather than a person producing a speech, and the Holy Spirit is the one who chooses an ordinary evening over a scheduled one.

So the forty versions were not wasted exactly. They were a way of holding something. But they were never going to be the door.

Romans 8:26 has the Spirit doing the work in the gap rather than the person producing a speech, and the Holy Spirit is the one who opens a door on an ordinary evening rather than on a scheduled one.

You are being prepared for something that will not look like your script, and it has never once required the script to be delivered. Romans 8:26 makes the intercession happen without utterance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the work in the gap where the words were meant to go.