Nine Years Of Explaining

The decision was made in the spring of a year he can name without thinking.

It was the right call. Two people who were there at the time still say so, and one of them says it unprompted, and he keeps that fact somewhere close.

But it went badly for somebody, and there was a version of it that got around, and the version was not fair, and it was never formally answered because there was nothing to formally answer it to.

So he has been answering it informally for nine years.

It comes out in the strangest places. A new family at church, six weeks in, asking a friendly question about how long he has been there, and forty seconds later he is at the spring of that year and he can see them getting more polite. A conference, over coffee, with a man he had never met. His own daughter's boyfriend, once, which he has not forgiven himself for.

He does not bring it up. He would tell you that honestly. What happens is that a door opens near it and he goes through the door.

He is tired. Not the tiredness of a hard week. He sleeps and it does not touch him, and he had a physical last year and everything was fine.

If you have been explaining yourself for years to people who never asked, you know exactly what I mean. And I am not going to tell you the decision was wrong. I am going to tell you what the explaining costs.

What an unanswered account does to a man

Let me describe something and you can decide how much of it is yours.

An unfair account of you is a wound with a particular shape. It does not hurt continuously; it sits quietly and then it opens at a mention. And because it cannot be answered once and for all, it can never be finished, so a man ends up carrying his defense with him the way you would carry an umbrella in a country where it rains.

That is not vanity. It is what a reasonable person does with an unresolved thing.

But look at what the umbrella costs. Nine years of it. Every new person is a potential venue. Every friendly question is a possible door. And you cannot meet anybody as a stranger anymore, because part of you is always checking whether they have heard the version.

Now read the sentence about Jesus that goes further than most people are comfortable with.

Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously.1 Peter 2:23

He did not answer it. That is the plain fact of the verse and it is worth sitting in for a moment, because He of all people had the case. He could have produced every document in the universe.

And Peter does not say He absorbed it or that He was above it. He says He handed it over. Committed Himself to the One who judges rightly, which is a legal act: transferring a matter to the court that has jurisdiction.

You are free to hand the whole account over, and the court is already sitting rather than being something you have to convene. That is not a rebuke of nine years. It is written in 1 Peter 2:23, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

So the explaining has not been diligence. You have a Judge who judges rightly, and the case has been in front of Him since the spring of that year. The word settled that before the decision was ever made, and the same Spirit who inspired it is on the porch while you read this.

Handing it over is not agreeing with it

Here is the distinction that will matter to you, because you are a precise man and you will be reaching for the objection already.

Committing a matter to a court is not conceding it. It is the opposite. It is refusing to settle it in a corridor with a stranger over coffee, on the grounds that a corridor is not a court and a stranger has no jurisdiction.

Every one of those conversations has been an attempt to get a verdict out of somebody who could not give you one. A new family at church cannot acquit you. Your daughter's boyfriend cannot acquit you. Even the two people who were there and still say it was right cannot do it, which is why keeping that fact close has never once settled anything for longer than an afternoon.

The relief is not in being believed by everybody. There is no arrangement of human agreement that would close this, and you have been going after it for nine years and getting more tired.

You have a verdict already lodged with the only court that could ever have issued one, and it is filed rather than pending. 1 Peter 2 shows Him committing Himself to the One who judges rightly; His Spirit is the one who makes a man able to leave a door unopened.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If the reason you cannot stop explaining is that somebody near you keeps reopening it and making you pay, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.