The Speech in the Lift Mirror

The staff lift is slow, which is why she uses it.

Third floor to the ground takes about forty seconds if nobody stops it, and the back wall is mirrored, and for forty seconds she is the only person in there with the trolley and the folded gowns and her own face.

She starts it at the second floor. She always starts it at the second floor.

It is in three parts and she knows it by heart. The first part says what happened, or rather says that nothing happened, which has always been the hardest part to word. The second part is the sorry, and she has worked on that one the most. The third part is the offer: that she is not asking to be where she used to be, only to be somewhere in the house at all.

There is a pause she leaves after the second part. She has practiced the pause. In the mirror it looks about right.

She gets to the middle of the third part and the lift stops at the first floor, which it does about half the time, and a man from maintenance gets in with a stepladder and says something about the weather. She says something back. The doors open on the ground.

Walking out across the lobby she does the thing she does every time, which is to decide it was not ready anyway. The second part is still not right. The second part has never been right.

She has been carrying that speech for a long time now. She has never once said it to God. She is waiting until it is good.

You have the whole thing worked out too. You know where it starts and how it ends and what you would leave out, and it is not written down anywhere and it does not need to be, because you could deliver it this minute if you thought it was ready. And you are not sure it is ready, and until it is, the whole business stays where it is, folded up, being improved.

Read the verbs in the order he wrote them

David wrote a psalm about exactly this and he put the words in an order most people read straight past.

Psalm 32 is a man who has been carrying something unsaid, and he says so plainly: while he kept silence, everything felt heavy. Then comes the turn, and the turn is one sentence, and the order of it is the whole point.

I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.Psalm 32:5

Read it again slowly. I said, I will confess. That is a man announcing an intention. It is not the confession. It is the moment before the confession, the breath taken at the second floor, the decision that the speech is going to be given. And what is the very next thing in the verse? And thou forgavest.

The forgiving does not wait for the wording. It lands on I will. The whole transaction is complete somewhere in the gap between deciding to speak and opening your mouth, and David, who was a careful writer, left the sentence in that order on purpose.

You are already received, and the receiving landed a long way before your speech got finished. That is not my kindness talking. It is written in Psalm 32, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that legible to you now, in a corridor or a car or wherever this has found you, which is not something a demand for a better apology does to a person.

The speech was never the price of anything

Here is what has actually been happening in that lift, and it is worth naming gently, because it has been costing you months.

The speech has quietly become the toll. Not on purpose. Nobody taught it to you. It just settled, the way things settle, and now there is a sequence in your head where the words get good enough, and then they get said, and then the welcome happens, in that order, with each step waiting on the one before it. So every time the second part is not right, the whole thing stays in the lift.

Psalm 32 takes that sequence apart. In David's line the forgiving arrives first and the confessing follows it, which means the welcome was never a response to the quality of anything. It was a response to a man turning toward God at all. And notice what he is not doing: he is not standing in front of anyone, he is not announcing it to a room, he is not asking permission from a person. This is a man and his God, and it is entirely between them.

You have a God who moved first, and nothing you say next has to earn the ground you are already standing on. I am not inventing that over you. Psalm 32 has the forgiving in the past tense before the confession is out, and it is His Spirit who has kept you circling this for months rather than letting you set it down, which is the kindest thing anybody has done for you all year.

Nobody is marking the sentence you say instead

Now the part that lets you put the speech down tonight.

If the wording was never the price, then the wording is free, and free means it can be bad. It can be four words. It can be the wrong four words. It can come out in the wrong order and stop in the middle and start again, and none of that is being scored, because there is no scoring in the verse and there is no scoring in the story Jesus told about a father and a son either.

That is why the instruction below is not to say the speech better. It is to abandon it, deliberately, mid line if you like, and say the plainest thing in your mouth instead. Not because the speech is bad. Because it has been standing in for something that was already done, and the only way to find that out is to arrive without it.

You have the standing to speak to Him with nothing prepared, and it is standing given to you in Christ rather than assembled by you across a year of drafts. That is what the written word says about anybody in Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries an unpolished sentence exactly as far as a polished one, which is all the way.