I Said It Out Loud

Everybody has gone home except Junie and the woman whose house it is. The chairs are still out on the grass where the group left them. The porch light has come on by itself the way it does, and the moths have already found it, and there are two mugs of coffee on the concrete beside them that went cold about an hour ago and neither of them has done anything about.

They are sitting on the back step. Junie is on the lower one with her back against the post.

The candle in the tin has burned down to a wick lying sideways in a pool of wax, and it has been going a long time, and the smell of it is the only thing keeping the mosquitoes honest. Somewhere down the street a screen door bangs. Junie has been talking for twenty minutes about her mother, and her job, and a thing her son said at Easter, and the woman whose house it is has said almost nothing at all, which is the reason Junie is still talking.

Then the woman says, "Junie. What do you actually want?"

And Junie starts to answer, and the answer that comes up out of her mouth is not the one she was planning. She was planning the sensible one. She hears herself take a breath, and stop, and take another one.

"I want somebody to be glad when they hear my car in the drive."

There it is. Twenty-six years of it, all the way at the bottom, and it took four seconds to say and it is nine words long.

The silence afterward is terrible. Not because the woman said anything. She did not say anything. It is terrible because Junie is now sitting on a concrete step hearing her own sentence in the air in front of her and it sounds like nothing. It sounds like a line off a greeting card. It sounds like something a person would be ashamed to have spent a marriage and two moves and a whole career being quietly hungry for.

She laughs the small hard laugh people laugh at themselves. "That's it," she says. "That's the whole thing. Twenty-six years, and that is what is underneath all of it, and it is pathetic."

The woman whose house it is does not agree with her and does not disagree with her. She reaches over and picks up one of the cold mugs and holds it in both hands, and after a while she says, "No. That's the truest thing you've said all year."

And the moths keep going at the light, and the candle in the tin gives out, and neither one of them gets up.

Nothing you say out loud gets smaller

I want to deal with the shame first, because it arrived about a second and a half after the sentence did and it is still sitting there.

When a hunger has been under everything for twenty-six years, a person expects it to be large. They expect it to come out of their mouth with the weight it has been carrying. And it never does. It comes out at nine words, in an ordinary voice, on an ordinary step, and the size of the sentence and the size of the ache have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. That mismatch is what makes people slap a laugh on the end of it and take it back.

So hear this before anything else. The sentence was not small. The sentence was accurate.

You are heard by God at the exact size you said it, and He did not need it dressed up to receive it. I am not being nice to you. Psalm 38:9 says all my desire is before Thee, and my groaning is not hid from Thee, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line like that off a page and puts it under a person sitting on a step at dusk feeling ridiculous.

Paul did this out loud too, in a letter, in public, in front of everybody who was ever going to read it.

Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.Philippians 3:8

Read what he is actually putting on that scale, because people get this wrong and it costs them. Go back four verses. Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a Pharisee, blameless as touching the law. That is his résumé. That is his standing, his credentials, his record of being right. It is not his longings. Paul is not on that page counting a woman's hope of being welcomed home as nothing.

You were never the person that verse was written to shame, and nothing in you is being weighed against Paul's list. Philippians 3:8 is a written accounting of religious credentials, not of human hungers, and the Spirit of God has never once used that page to tell somebody their ache was beneath Him.

Beside Him is not the same as instead of Him

Here is the word that carries the whole thing: excellency. Paul is not doing subtraction. He is doing comparison, and comparison only works when both things are real.

If your longing were nothing, there would be nothing to put beside Christ, and the sentence would be empty. The reason Paul's line has any force at all is that the things he counted as loss were genuinely worth something. They were the best of what a man could hold. That is the whole point. Something arrived that was so much heavier that everything else on the scale went up in the air, and Paul is not standing there telling anybody their side of the scale was junk. He is telling them what he found.

So nobody is asking you to think less of the nine words. The nine words stay. You are holding a real hunger, not an embarrassing one, and it is going on the scale beside Him rather than into the garbage. Scripture says He satisfies the longing soul, not that He deletes it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes the difference between those two verbs and makes it something a person can feel in their chest.

And now the part that matters most in this category, so I will say it plainly.

Jesus said, I am the bread of life; he that cometh to me shall never hunger. He did not say, I am the correction of your appetite. He named Himself as the thing eaten. You have a Christ who answers the hunger you actually named, and not a more impressive one you might have named instead. John 6:35 is a written promise about bread rather than about willpower, and the Spirit of God is the One who carries it past all the sensible answers you had ready and sets it against the nine words you actually said.