It Frightened Me How Much Came Out

It was not the shouting. You have shouted before and it did not do this to you.

It was that for about four seconds there was more of it than you knew was in there. Something came up from a long way down and it had a size to it, and you heard it come out of your own mouth and you did not entirely recognize the voice.

And then it stopped, and you made toast, and the day went on.

You have not told anybody. Not one person. You have run it back about forty times since and every single one of those replays has happened inside your own head.

That is the part I want to talk about, more than the anger.

I am not going to teach you a method for managing it. That is a technique and this is not a place that hands those out. And I am not going to tell you it was fine, because you were standing there, and you know it was not the ordinary kind.

Search me, O God

There is a prayer at the end of Psalm 139 that a person only prays when they have become a stranger to themselves.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts. (Psalm 139:23, King James Version)

Search me. That is a request, and it is an odd one to make, because the man asking is inviting an inspection of exactly the place he is most afraid of.

He does it because the whole psalm before it has already established what kind of God is doing the searching. Somebody who knows his sitting down and his rising up, who was there before he was born, who is present at the far end of the sea.

So the searching in that verse is not an investigation by a stranger. It is being known by somebody who has been there the whole time.

You are searched by somebody who has been present for every one of those four seconds, and none of it has ever been news to Him. Psalm 139:23 says search me, O God, and know my heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that an invitation rather than an exposure.

And notice there is no bargaining in it. He does not say search me and I hope You find it acceptable. He asks to be known, which is a different request from asking to be approved.

You have permission to be known before you are sorted out, and the order of that has never once been reversed. It is written in Psalm 139:23 that the searching comes as a request rather than a sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the looking without building a case.

The thing that grows in the dark

Now the part that matters most today, and it is not the four seconds.

It is the forty replays. It is that this has been living entirely inside one person's head for however many days it has been, and a thing kept in there does not stay the same size.

It grows. It gets a story attached to it. It starts meaning something about who you are, and then it starts predicting what you might do, and none of that would survive being said out loud to another human being for ninety seconds.

Psalm 139:23 has a man saying the worst of it to somebody else rather than turning it over alone, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in the saying rather than in the sorting.

You are able to bring this out into the light, and it has never once had to be understood before it could be said. Psalm 139:23 asks God to search and know rather than asking the person to explain, and the Holy Spirit is the one who meets somebody who cannot account for their own four seconds.

So here is the plain sentence, and I am going to put it in the middle of this article rather than tucking it at the end.

Tell somebody today. A doctor, a pastor, a counselor, one friend who will keep it. Say what happened and say that it frightened you. That is the whole thing you have to say.

That is not a failure and it is not the beginning of losing anything. It is the right move, made by somebody who is paying attention, and it is the same act as calling about a pain in your chest instead of waiting to see.

You are doing the right thing by telling somebody, and there has never been a version of this where staying quiet was the braver option. Psalm 139:23 is a man handing over the inside of himself for inspection, and the Holy Spirit is the one who goes with a person into that conversation.

And if anybody in your house is being hurt, telling somebody is right, and it is not for you to weigh up whether it counts as bad enough. That weighing belongs to somebody trained for it, and handing it over is the correct and loving thing to do.

You are covered while you make that call, and no part of it has ever been a thing you had to be brave enough for on your own. Psalm 139:23 has a man inviting the whole inside of himself to be seen, and the Spirit of God is the one who goes into the conversation with him rather than waiting outside it.

What the size of it does not mean

One more thing, because there is a conclusion sitting there waiting and it is the wrong one.

The size of what came out does not tell anybody what kind of person is standing there. It says something has been under pressure for a long time with no way out, and pressure without an outlet does not stay small.

That is not an excuse and I am not offering it as one. It is a description of a system, and systems can be attended to.

And this is not a verdict on you. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not the truth about you finally surfacing after years of pretending.

You have not been unmasked by four seconds, and the size of it has never once been a report on your character. The written word asks to be searched in Psalm 139:23 without ever handing down a sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who examines a person without condemning them.