It Was Over Nothing And I Know It

It was a cup. Or a shoe. Or the sound somebody makes with a spoon.

That is the part that has been bothering you all day. Not the temper. The size of what set it off.

If a real thing had happened, you would have somewhere to put this. A person can explain losing it over a broken window. There is a shape to that story and it makes sense when told out loud.

There is no shape to what happened this morning. Somebody did something almost invisible and a great deal came out of you, and now you are walking around with a mismatch you cannot account for.

And the sum you keep running is the wrong sum. You keep weighing the size of the offense against the size of the reaction and coming out with a number that frightens you.

I am not going to explain to you where it came from. I do not know, and anybody who tells you confidently is selling something. And I am not going to say it was nothing, because a person in that kitchen felt it and you saw them feel it.

If thou shouldest mark

There is one line in Psalm 130 that goes straight at the arithmetic running in your head, and it does it with a question.

If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? (Psalm 130:3, King James Version)

Mark. It is an accounting word. To mark is to note down, to keep the tally, to build a record that can be produced later.

And the question is not really a question. It is a man saying that if God kept that kind of record, nobody at all would be left standing, including everybody who has ever read this verse and felt reasonably alright about themselves.

You are not being marked this morning, and there is no running account of it anywhere in heaven. Psalm 130:3 asks who shall stand if the LORD should mark iniquities, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts that question in front of a person who has been keeping their own tally all day.

Notice the psalm does not minimize anything. It never says the iniquities are small or imaginary. It grants the whole thing and then says the marking is not happening.

That is a completely different comfort from being told it was not a big deal, and it is a much stronger one, because it does not require you to agree to a lie about this morning.

You have a real thing forgiven rather than a small thing dismissed, and it has never once needed to be shrunk first. It is written in Psalm 130:3 that the marking is not kept, and the Spirit of God is the one who forgives the actual size of a thing instead of talking it down.

The mismatch is not a diagnosis

Now the mismatch itself, because that is what is genuinely frightening you and it deserves a straight answer.

A large reaction to a small event does not tell anybody what kind of person is standing there. It says the small event was not carrying the whole load, and almost nothing in a household ever is.

That is not an excuse. An explanation and an excuse are different things, and the difference is that an excuse asks to be let off. This is not asking anything.

You are not a person revealed by this morning, and a large reaction to a small thing has never once been the truth coming out. Psalm 130:3 refuses to keep the account rather than reading it back to somebody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who declines to build a case out of one kitchen.

And I want to say the plain thing, because it is what has been running underneath all day.

This is not a verdict on you. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about how much you love the person who was holding the spoon.

You have not been failing quietly for years, and one morning over nothing has never been a report on a whole household. The written word will not produce a record in Psalm 130:3, and the Spirit of God is the one who refuses to let a person read a bad ten minutes as a life.

Where a frightening amount of anger goes

There is a version of this I have to name properly, because it turns up on a page like this one and it must not be stepped past.

If what came out of you this morning frightened you, or if it has been growing, or if there is any part of you wondering what you might do, then telling somebody is right. Not eventually. Today.

A doctor, a pastor, a counselor, one person you trust who will not repeat it. That is not a failure and it is not the end of anything. It is the same act as saying a thing out loud so it stops being enormous in the dark.

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 judgment belongs to somebody trained to make it.

You are able to tell one person today, and doing that has never once made you a worse parent than staying quiet. Psalm 130:3 has God refusing to hold the record over anybody's head, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a phone call that gets made rather than in a decision to manage alone.