The Same Four People

There are four of them and Makana has known three of them since he was eleven years old.

That is the number and it is not a gang and it is not a bad crowd in the way a school assembly would use the phrase. It is four men in their thirties who work, who have children, two of whom he was best man for.

They know things about him nobody else alive knows. They know what he was like the year his father left. One of them held his head over a rail at a bus station when he was nineteen and never told a soul about it, not once, in fifteen years.

He has been clear for eleven months.

He has new people. There is a Tuesday group with about nine in it and there is a man called Peter who rings him and he genuinely likes those people, and here is what he cannot say to a single one of them:

They have no idea who he is.

Not in a sinister way. It is simply true. Peter has known him eleven months. Peter has never met his mother, never seen the house he grew up in, does not know that he could have played rugby at a level, does not know the year with his father, does not know one funny thing about him from before.

To the Tuesday group he is a man in recovery. That is the whole of it. He is a good man and a valued man and a completely two dimensional one.

And to the four, he is entirely himself, and the version they know is the one that cannot go back.

I can be known or I can be new. I cannot be both, and everybody who tells me to leave has never once explained where I am supposed to take fifteen years of my own history.

And here is where I stop talking about Makana, because you have your own four, and everybody in your life has an opinion about them, and nobody has ever answered the actual question.

Let me name the wound first, because if it is not named you will nod at this and go on Friday anyway: what is pulling you back is not the substance and it is not weakness. It is that being new with strangers is a form of loneliness nobody warns you about, and going back is the only place you have ever been fully known.

The new thing is God's work, not your performance

Let me put the true thing down first, because you have been carrying this alone and it is heavier than anybody has understood.

You are not required to manufacture a new self for people to meet. The new thing is not something you generate and then present, and God says so in a verse that puts every verb on His side: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

Behold, I do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.Isaiah 43:19

Look at where the work sits. I do. I will make. The person being spoken to is not manufacturing anything, and their job in that verse is to notice.

And look at the word now. Not once you have built the new life. Not once you have found people who know you. It springs forth in the middle of the wilderness, which is precisely the place with nobody in it. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.

And then the detail that is aimed straight at your situation: rivers in the desert. He does not move the person out of the dry place before He supplies water. He puts water where the person is.

So the newness is His work and it is happening in the lonely part, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own encouragement, and God's Spirit is not waiting for you to have eleven years of friends before He calls you new.

Being known takes time and nothing shortens it

Now let me answer your actual question, because it is a fair one and it deserves a real answer rather than a slogan.

You asked where to take fifteen years of your own history. Here is the truth: nowhere, quickly. Nobody in that Tuesday group will know you the way those four do for a long time, and there is no technique that shortens it, and anybody who tells you otherwise has not been where you are.

But look carefully at what you actually said. Peter does not know about the rugby, or your mother, or the funny things from before.

Have you told him?

That is not a rebuke. It is the most practical sentence in this whole message. You have been carrying being-unknown as a permanent condition when a great deal of it is simply information that has not been handed over, and the reason it has not been handed over is that a man in recovery does not think he is allowed to be a whole person yet.

You are allowed. Tell Peter about the rugby. Tell them a funny thing from before. The two dimensional man is not what they made of you, it is what you have been offering them.

Hear this: you are not owned by an old version and you are not required to leave your own history behind in order to be free. God is doing a new thing in the wilderness itself, and the wilderness is where the water goes. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can do on Tuesday rather than something you agree with.

And the plain half, because a message without it has failed you. Real help exists and none of it is small faith. If you are in a program, this exact loneliness is one of the most common things people bring to it, and saying it out loud will not surprise anybody in that room. A counselor is not an overreaction. And if you are ever in danger, if you have used more than you meant to, or you are unwell from stopping, or the thought has turned toward not being here, get medical help now and tell one person today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. There are people awake right now.