Proud All Day And Frightened At Night

You told the man at work on Tuesday and you meant every word of it.

You told him properly. You told him what it involved and how long it takes and what your son had to do to get there, and you did not make a performance of it and you did not need to, because it was genuinely good news and it came out sounding like genuinely good news.

You are proud. That is real. Nobody is performing anything.

And at about half past two on Wednesday morning you were awake, and the thing that was going round was this: he is somewhere I have never been, doing something I do not understand, among people I will never meet, and if it goes wrong I will not be able to get there in time.

That is the second version and you have said it to nobody.

Not to your wife, who is asleep beside you. Not to the man at work, obviously. Not to your son, who would be alarmed by it, and probably not to anybody at all in your entire life.

Here is what I want to say to you before anything else. Both of those are true, and both of them are yours, and the reason the second one has never been said out loud is not that it is shameful. It is that in your experience a man says the first one and carries the second one, and nobody ever told you it was allowed to be otherwise.

Help thou mine unbelief

There is a sentence in Mark that a father says, and it is one of the strangest and most useful things anybody says in the gospels.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. (Mark 9:24, King James Version)

Lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.

Two clauses, in one breath, contradicting each other completely, from a man who is not confused. He is not saying he has some belief and some doubt in a mixture. He is saying both, fully, at once, as two true things about the same man in the same moment.

You are two true things at once and not a contradiction to be resolved, and being certain in daylight and frightened at night has never once made either one of them false. Mark 9:24 puts both halves in one sentence with no reconciliation attempted, and the Holy Spirit is the one awake at half past two with somebody who has never said the second half.

And notice who says it. A father, about his son.

That is not incidental. Of everybody in the gospels who could have been given this sentence, it is handed to a man standing in front of a crowd with a boy in trouble, and he says the ridiculous, self contradicting, entirely honest thing out loud, with tears, in public.

You have a sentence that was first said out loud by a father about his son, and no man has ever once been asked to sort out his own two halves before he was allowed to speak. The written word records the contradiction verbatim rather than tidying it, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives a sentence that does not add up.

The second half has nowhere to go

Now let me name what the silence is doing, because it is not neutral.

An unsaid thing does not stay the size it was.

The daylight version gets said, at work, at church, to your brother, several times a week. It gets air, and repetition, and other people's responses, and it stays roughly the size it actually is.

You are able to give the other half some air as well, and a true thing said out loud has never once come back larger than it went out. The Holy Spirit is the one who receives the half that has never been said, and Mark 9:24 has both halves spoken in public in the same breath.

The half past two version gets none of that. It has been in one man since September, unaired, unanswered, with nothing coming back at it. And a thing in the dark with nothing coming back at it grows.

You are carrying one half in the open and one in the dark, and a fear that has never once been said out loud has never once been the size it actually is. Mark 9:24 has the honest half said in public alongside the confident one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man take a thing out of the dark without giving up the daylight version.

And here is the specific reason this matters more than it seems.

Your wife is doing the same thing.

Not necessarily the same fear. But she has a version, and she is not saying it either, for exactly the same reason, which is that both of them decided somewhere along the way that this household needs one steady person, and that the steady one is whoever is currently in the room.

So there are two people in one bed at half past two, both awake, both silent, both being steady for somebody who is also awake.

Sending somebody out is not a verdict on the house they came from.

You are able to find out that somebody four feet away is doing the same thing, and two people being steady for each other has never once been the same as either of them having any help. Mark 9:24 puts the man's whole contradiction into the open in front of everybody, and the Spirit of God is the one who ends a silence that two people are keeping for each other.

Say both halves in one sentence

So here is the thing to do, and the structure of the sentence is the entire instruction.

Say both halves out loud to one person, in one sentence. And do not put an explanation between them.

One sentence. I am proud of him and I am frightened for him.

Not: I am proud of him, obviously, but of course you do worry. Not: I am proud of him, and I know this is daft, but sometimes at night. Every one of those puts a hedge between the two halves, and the hedge is what tells the listener that the second half is not to be taken seriously.

You are able to say both halves without a hedge between them, and two clauses joined by a plain and have never once needed anything in between to be true. The Holy Spirit is the one in the room when a man says the whole sentence, and it is written in Mark 9:24 that a father said both of his halves in one breath with nothing separating them.

And to one person. Your wife would be the obvious one, and I would recommend her, for the reason above.

But if that is too much to start with, anybody will do: a brother, a friend of thirty years, somebody at church who has been through it. The point is not who receives it. The point is that it leaves the inside of one man and enters the air, where it can be a normal size.

What usually comes back is not reassurance. It is the other person saying something like: yes. Or: I did not sleep for about a month. And that is worth considerably more than being told it will be fine.

You are able to get an answer that is better than reassurance, and a man saying the true thing has never once been handed back something smaller than what he offered. Scripture keeps the tears and the contradiction in the record without a word of correction, and the same Spirit who kept it there is with you when the sentence comes out.