The Speech I Give in the Car

He gives it on the dual carriageway, mostly, on the long stretch where there is nothing to look at.

It has got very good over two years. It opens quietly, which is the strongest way to open, and there is a part in the middle where he lists the three things in order, and there is a line about the week in November that he has never improved on because it cannot be improved on. He has delivered it hundreds of times to a windscreen at seventy miles an hour, and the man it is addressed to has never heard a word of it.

They had a business. Not a big one. It ran on trust and a shared bank account and eleven years of knowing each other, and it ran well until it did not, and when it came apart there was money in it that was his and there was a set of decisions taken while he was dealing with his mother's funeral.

Nobody stole anything. That is what makes it unbearable rather than simple. There is no crime in it. There is a series of choices that a man makes when the other man is not in the room, and a silence afterwards, and a number that never came back, and a friendship of eleven years that just stopped like a radio being switched off.

So he drives, and he gives the speech.

And once, about a year in, his wife was in the passenger seat and he did not realize he had started, and she let him get about four sentences in before she said his name.

He has not done it in front of anybody since.

You know that stretch of road. Yours might be a shower, or a walk, or the ten minutes before you fall asleep. There is a conversation you have had four hundred times and never once had. And here is what nobody tells you about rehearsing: the person you are rehearsing to is not there, so the only body in the room absorbing all of it, every single time, is yours.

Pull in. Turn the engine off. There is tea and there is bread on the wall by the trees, and I want to show you where Scripture actually puts a file like yours.

There is no code, and there is a court that is not yours

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I will not keep a man in your position reading in hope of one.

There is no code. There is no arrangement of Scripture that makes a man pay you back. Nothing here is a technique for recovery, and if letting go were a lever that produced money it would not be letting go at all, it would be a slower kind of grip, and God has never dealt with anybody by that method.

Here is what is actually written, and it is not what people think it is.

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.Romans 12:19

Now, most men hear that as a threat aimed at the other fellow, and go away quietly pleased. That is not what it says, and reading it that way keeps you exactly where you are, because a man waiting to see the repaying is still holding the file.

Look at the actual instruction. Give place. Make room. Step out of the seat you have been occupying. Paul is not telling you that your loss does not matter, he is telling you it matters enough to be handled by somebody with real standing, and that your standing in it is the one thing that was never real. You have been prosecuting a case in a car at seventy miles an hour, in a court with no judge, no defendant and no record.

You are not the one holding this file, and the case was never yours to carry. That is not a consolation I have arranged for you on a wall by a grove. It is written into Romans 12, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an apostle's instruction and lays it across a windscreen on a long straight road.

You have a God who has already taken it, and He has never once mislaid what was put in His hands. Scripture says He is the Judge of all the earth and that He does right, and His Spirit is the one who takes that written line and lets a man's shoulders come off his ears.

Now let me name the true thing, because you would hear it in my voice if I dodged it.

The speech is not about the money and it is barely about the business. It is about the week in November. You were burying your mother and decisions were being made about your life in a room you were not in, and what that says to a man, underneath everything, is that he was not thought of. That is the wound. The number is the only part of it you can hold up and point at, so you have been holding up the number for two years, because a number is sayable and being unthought of is not.

You were not forgettable, and nothing done in that week is a true statement about your worth. Scripture says He has graven you on the palms of His hands, which is a strange and physical way to say you are not out of mind, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an image like that and lets it settle in a chest that has been tight since November.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because two years of rehearsal will not end because a friend gave you tea. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what rehearsing never does. So say it out loud, in that car, on your own. You have the standing to speak to a case you have been carrying and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by grievance, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a windscreen.