I Think I Did Something And Nobody Will Say

The silence would be easier if you knew what it was for.

That is the honest shape of it. If somebody came and said, it is because of what you said at the thing in March, you would be able to do something with that. Apologize, explain, sit with it, take it.

Instead there is nothing. A house that is polite and slightly cooler than it was, and no charge sheet anywhere.

So you have started searching yourself. In the car, at eleven at night, standing at a window. Going back through months looking for the sentence, the moment, the decision that would explain the temperature.

And you cannot ask, because asking would put it into words, and there is a version of this where nothing is actually wrong and asking would create the very thing you are afraid of.

I am not going to help you find out what it was. That is not something an article can do and anybody claiming otherwise is guessing at your expense. And I am not going to tell you it is nothing, because you live there and I do not.

Who can understand his errors

There is a verse in Psalm 19 that says the honest thing about self examination, and the honest thing is that it does not work.

Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults. (Psalm 19:12, King James Version)

Who can understand his errors. That is a real question with a real answer, and the answer is nobody.

David has been going through the law and its brightness in that psalm, and he arrives at this line as a man who has just realized that examining himself is not going to be sufficient, because the search is being run by the same person who has the blind spots.

You are not able to audit yourself accurately, and no amount of searching at eleven at night has ever been going to work. Psalm 19:12 asks who can understand his errors, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a house where somebody has been going back through months.

And then he does not solve it. He hands it over. Cleanse thou me from secret faults.

Secret faults means secret from him. Not hidden from God, not hidden from other people necessarily, but not visible to the man asking. And his response to not being able to see them is to ask for cleansing rather than for information.

You are able to be cleansed of what you cannot even identify, and none of it has ever required you to name it first. It is written in Psalm 19:12 that the request is cleanse thou me from secret faults, and the Spirit of God is the one who deals with what a person cannot locate.

The searching is doing damage

Now let me say what the eleven o'clock searching is actually costing, because it feels responsible and it is not neutral.

A search with no possible end does not stop. It goes back further, it finds more candidates, and every ambiguous memory gets recruited as evidence, because a mind that is looking for a fault will always find something that could be one.

By the third week you are not investigating an incident any more. You are building a case, and the case is against you, and there is no defense counsel in the room.

Psalm 19:12 ends the audit rather than extending it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who closes an investigation that was never going to reach a verdict.

You are not on trial in your own house, and the case being built at eleven at night has never once had a prosecutor except you. Psalm 19:12 hands the whole matter over instead of pursuing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shuts down a search that has no end in it.

And here is the plain thing, because six weeks of this has turned into something.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about the parent standing at that window.

It is a quiet house and a person who cannot see their own blind spots, which is the ordinary human condition and not a diagnosis.

You have not been condemned by a silence, and a cooler house has never been a charge sheet with your name on it. The written word asks for cleansing rather than for a list in Psalm 19:12, and the Spirit of God is the one who declines to issue the accusation a person has been waiting for.

If it turns out there is something

One straight thing, because there is a version of this where the fear is right.

If something has actually happened, it will surface, and it will surface because they say it, not because you found it. That is how these things move.

And when it surfaces, the response is short. Take it, say sorry for the thing itself, do not explain, and do not ask them to manage how you feel about having been told.

You are equipped for that conversation if it ever comes, and none of it has ever required you to have found it first. It is written in Psalm 19:12 that the cleansing is asked for rather than the list, and the Spirit of God is the one who prepares a person without rehearsing them.

Until then, the searching has no object, and the honest thing to do with it is to hand it over rather than to keep running it.

Psalm 19:12 asks for cleansing without waiting for an identification, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that work in a person who cannot get at it themselves.

You are cleansed in the places you cannot reach, and the work of it has never once waited on your investigation. Psalm 19:12 says cleanse thou me from secret faults, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets in where a person's own eyes do not go.