Eleven Drafts Of One Message

Eleven drafts of four lines, and she is on a bus, and her thumb has been over send for about forty seconds.

The upstairs of a bus in the afternoon, the front seat that everybody wants and she got, so the whole street is coming at her through a window with a scratch across it. Somebody two rows back is watching something without headphones. The heating is on far too high in a way that will make her sleepy in about ten minutes.

The message is to a friend. It says she cannot come on Saturday.

That is it. That is the entire content. She cannot come on Saturday because of a shift she cannot move, and this is true, and the friend will not mind, and there is not one single thing at stake anywhere in this exchange.

Draft one was three lines and sounded cold.

Draft four had an exclamation mark in it and read as though she was pleased about it.

Draft seven explained the shift and was too long, so somebody reading it would think she was making excuses, which would mean she was hiding something, which would mean the whole thing was a lie.

Draft eleven is fine. It is genuinely fine. She has read it four times looking for the thing in it, and she has not found the thing, and that is not the same as there not being a thing.

Her thumb is over send.

And what is actually happening on the top deck of a bus is not indecision. She is not deciding. She is checking the message for a crime, the way she checks everything for a crime, and she has been doing this so long that she does not experience it as an unusual activity, she experiences it as being careful.

She sends it. Two seconds later she reads it again in the sent folder, looking.

That is you, and your eleven drafts might be an email, or a voicemail you rehearse before you leave it, or a two minute review of everything you said on the way home from anywhere.

Before anything else. Nothing on this page is going to diagnose you, and nothing here is going to tell you where any of this comes from or hand you a procedure. That would be a technique, and if a reader could get it wrong it does not belong on this site. And if this has taken you somewhere darker, tell one person today who can act: your doctor, a crisis line where you live, one friend who will come. And whatever runs while your thumb sits over send, it is not a person, and that includes you. Scripture says the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and nothing here is going to hand you an opponent with your own face on it.

David reaches for a distance that cannot be measured

There is a line in a psalm about how far a thing has been taken, and the geography in it is deliberate.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

He could have said north and south. He did not, and the reason is not decorative.

North and south have ends. There is a north pole and there is a south pole, and the distance between them is a number, and if you keep going north you eventually stop going north and start going south.

East and west do not do that. Go east and you keep going east forever. There is no point at which you turn around. The distance is not large; it is a distance with no quantity, and that is the whole reason he chose it.

So far hath he removed our transgressions from us. Removed. Past tense, done, and taken to a distance that cannot be expressed as a number.

Which means there is nothing at the far end to go and check. That is the part that matters on the top deck of a bus. The removing was not a filing. It was not a putting somewhere safe. There is no folder.

You are separated from it by a distance with no number, and it was taken that far without any assistance from you. That is not a comforting phrase for a woman with her thumb over send: Psalm 103:12 puts the removing in the completed tense and picks the one axis with no endpoint, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a removed thing feel removed in a body that reads its own sent folder rather than the amount of certainty anybody can reach on an afternoon bus.

The checking is not conviction, and here is how to tell

Now the practical part, and it needs saying carefully.

Two things can happen inside a person and they sound alike, and the difference is not how anxious it makes you.

Conviction is specific. It names one thing. It hands over something that can actually be done, usually small and usually today. It faces forward. And it finishes.

Accusation is total and it does not end. It does not name a thing done; it renders a verdict on the person. It hands over nothing to do, or hands over something already done.

And here is the tell for this particular bus, and it is the most useful sentence in the article: conviction knows what it is about.

That sounds obvious and it is not. When the Holy Spirit deals with somebody about a thing, He deals with them about that thing. He does not send a person out to search their own text messages for an unspecified offense. There is no such thing as a general audit from God. He is not vague, because vagueness would be no use to Him: He is trying to get something dealt with, and you cannot deal with an unnamed thing.

So a search is not conviction. A search is what happens when a verdict has already been assumed and the evidence has not turned up yet. Eleven drafts is not carefulness. It is a woman looking for the charge that she believes must exist because she believes she is the sort of person there is always a charge against.

You have never once been sent looking for something God had not already named. The written word puts the transgressions at a distance with no end and never asks anybody to go and verify it, and His Spirit names one thing at a time and then finishes, never a general audit of a four line message.