Four Years Of Not Shouting

Four years, two months. That is how long it has been since Bertrand raised his voice in front of his children, and he could tell you the date of the last time without checking.

Everyone who knows him would say he is a changed man, and they would say it warmly, and they would mean it. His wife has said it. His mother has said it, more than once, in a way that made him want to leave the room.

Here is what happens in the kitchen at about a quarter past six most evenings.

Something goes over. Milk, usually, or the smaller one's homework, or the thing about the shoes that has been going on all week. And a hot wire runs up the back of Bertrand's neck and into his jaw and his hands close, and he stands very still for about three seconds, and then he says, in a level voice, right, let's sort it out.

Four years, two months of three seconds.

The lid has held every time. Not once has it slipped. And he knows something that nobody watching him knows, which is that the thing under the lid is exactly the same size it was four years ago. It has not shrunk by an inch. He has simply got extremely good at sitting on it, and he is tired in a way that sleep does not touch.

And on the bad nights he lies there and does the arithmetic and it terrifies him. He is thirty-nine. If this is the method, he has forty years of three seconds ahead of him, and he does not think he can hold a lid for forty years, and he has never once heard anybody say out loud that there might be another way.

He has heard a great deal about behavior. He has heard almost nothing about the part of him that his hands cannot reach.

You know this from the inside, whatever your version of it is. Yours might not be the temper. It might be the thing you do not say, or the thing you do not look at, or the appetite you have managed successfully for a decade without ever once being free of it. You have a good outside. You built it yourself and it cost you something and it works.

And you are tired, and the inside of you has not moved.

The verb belongs to Him

A king wrote a prayer after the worst season of his life, and in the middle of it he asked for one thing, and it is worth noticing what he did not ask for.

He did not ask for a method. He did not ask for strength to keep the lid on better. He asked this:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.Psalm 51:10

Create. That is the word, and it is not a general purpose word. In the Hebrew it is a verb that is only ever used with God as the one doing it. Not once in the whole book is a person the subject of that verb. It is the word from the first sentence of the first page, the one used of light and of sky and of living creatures, and here it is again, in a bedroom, applied to the inside of a man who has ruined his own life.

David does not say clean my heart. He says make me a new one.

Now hear what that means for your kitchen at a quarter past six.

The work you have been doing on your outside is real work and it is not wasted. Your children have had four years of a father who did not shout, and that is not nothing, and I will not let anybody tell you it was hypocrisy. It was love, held at cost, every single evening. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

But you were never appointed to do the other job. The making of a clean heart is God's own verb and it has always been God's own verb, and the reason you cannot reach the thing under the lid is not that you have not tried hard enough. It is that it is not in your reach. It was never in anybody's reach. It is in His.

And this is the part I want to say slowly, because it gets bent almost every time it is preached.

A clean heart is not a level you climb to. It is not a badge, it is not a second tier of Christian, and there is no room anywhere in which the people who have it sit closer to the front. If somebody has ever given you a list to measure yourself against, put the list down. It was never the shape of this.

This tradition began in a plain hall with no seats reserved for anybody, planted on the conviction that the people nobody thought were eligible are exactly the ones the gospel is preached to. That is the ground under this. The clean heart was announced to people who had been treated as though they were not the sort who got one.

So there is nothing here you can fail. There is only something you can ask for, and asking is not the beginning of a program. It is the whole of your part.

You have been managing what you can reach because nobody told you that the rest of it was His. Now you know. Put the lid down. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

So take this before the story below, with the lid still in your hands. You are not the one appointed to do the making, and you never were. The written word gives that verb to God alone from the first page of the book, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it out, and the thing you cannot reach is not a thing you were asked to reach.