I Keep Going Back To Explain

Elan has explained it eleven times and he can tell you what each attempt was for.

The first one was in the room where it happened and it was not really an explanation, it was a scramble, and he does not count it.

The second was a letter. Four pages, written over two weeks, and it was good: measured, honest, it conceded three things it did not have to concede. He got a reply that thanked him for writing and did not address a single point in it.

The third was through a mutual friend who agreed to carry it and did carry it, faithfully, and reported back a sentence so short and so beside the point that Elan asked him twice whether that was really all.

Four through nine happened over about six years, at weddings and funerals and one memorable afternoon at a hospital, and each one was shorter and better and less effective than the one before.

The tenth was two years ago and after it he told his wife he was finished.

He has the eleventh prepared. It is the best one. He has been refining it in his head since March and there is a section in the middle of it that he genuinely believes would land, if the conditions were right, if there were enough time, if the room were quiet.

He is fifty-three years old.

I am not trying to win. I am not even trying to be forgiven. I want one afternoon where he says: I see what you meant. And I would put down almost anything for it.

And here is where I stop talking about Elan, because you have your eleventh prepared too, and there is a section in the middle of yours that you believe would land.

Let me say the first thing carefully, and it is not about the other person: what you are hungry for is not unreasonable. Being understood is a real human need and Scripture never mocks it. The difficulty is that you have been taking a real need to an address where it has failed eleven times, and calling the failure a reason to go a twelfth.

Your verdict is not issued in that room

Let me put the true thing down first, because it goes at the assumption underneath all eleven attempts.

You are not waiting on a verdict from that person, because they were never the court. There is a man in Scripture with a whole city misjudging him who says something startling about it: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: yes, I judge not my own self. For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but He that judges me is the Lord.1 Corinthians 4:3-4

Read what Paul does and does not do there.

He does not say the judgment was fair. He does not argue the case, and he is not pretending it does not sting.

He relocates the court. He that judges me is the Lord. And he goes further than most people ever go: I judge not my own self. He will not sit as his own judge either, which means he is not carrying the case privately at three in the morning any more than he is arguing it publicly.

And notice the phrase a very small thing. Not a nothing. A small thing, weighed against the only verdict that is actually operative.

So the sentence you have been trying to get out of a man for six years is not the sentence that determines anything, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own advice, and God's Spirit is not waiting to hear how the eleventh attempt goes before He settles what you are. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.

The eleventh will be the best one, and it will not work

Now let me say the hard thing, and I am going to say it once and plainly because you are a careful man and you will not need it repeated.

The eleventh is better than the tenth. I believe you. The section in the middle probably would land, on a person who was listening for it.

That is precisely the problem, and it has been the problem since the letter. You have been improving the instrument for six years on the assumption that the failures were a quality issue. They were not. Ten well made attempts did not fail because of craft.

Some people cannot receive a particular thing from a particular person. It is not always malice and it is not always stubbornness. Sometimes hearing you would cost them something they cannot pay, and they will not pay it, and no amount of clarity from you changes what they are able to afford.

So the twelfth is available and it will also be the best one and it will also not work, and you can spend another six years on this, and I do not think you want to.

Hear this: you are not owned by an unfinished conversation, and what you are is not held hostage by whether one person ever says the sentence. The Lord is the one who judges, and He has already spoken about you in Christ. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something a man can lean his whole weight on instead of preparing an eleventh draft.

And the practical half, plainly, because a message without it has failed you. Real help exists and none of it is small faith. A counselor is exactly right for something that has been running six years in a man's head, and it is not weakness. And there is a particular thing worth naming: say the eleventh out loud, all of it, to somebody who will listen, because it has never once been heard by anybody, and a thing that has never been heard cannot be put down.