Not My Place To Tell It

He is the only one left who heard it firsthand.

His great aunt told him when he was eleven, sitting on a mat in the afternoon, and she told him the whole of it, and she told him twice on purpose so that it would stick, and he understood at the time that this was why she was doing it.

He is sixty three now.

Twice he has been asked. The first time was a nephew at a funeral, eight years ago, half interested, in the way of somebody making conversation. He said something short and turned it. The second time was two years ago and it was not conversation at all: a young woman in his family, twenty two, who is doing something serious with all of this, came to his house with a notebook.

He gave her the outline. Names and dates and where. He did not give her the part his great aunt told him twice, and he knows exactly which part that is, and so does the reader of his own face.

His reason is the same both times, and it is a good one where he is from: it is not his place to tell it.

He is not the eldest. He was not the one it happened to. There were people who had more right to that story than he does, and it was theirs to give.

The last of those people died in March.

If you are holding something and have ruled that it is not yours to say, you know exactly what I mean.

What restraint is for

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting a long time for anybody to say it.

Silence is not automatically humility. Sometimes it is, and there is a good and necessary quiet that belongs to a man who knows a thing is not his to broadcast. That is real and this page is not going to take it off you.

But look at what one of the psalms does with restraint when the thing being restrained belongs to God.

I have preached righteousness in the great congregation: lo, I have not refrained my lips, O LORD, thou knowest.Psalm 40:9

He says it to God as though it were something he had been asked to do and had done. Not refrained. He offers his unrestrained lips as obedience.

And the verse after it is more pointed still: I have not hid Your righteousness within my heart, I have declared Your faithfulness and Your salvation.

Hid within my heart. That is a phrase for keeping a good thing where nobody can get at it.

You are holding something that was put into your keeping, and keeping is not the same act as hiding. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Psalm 40:9, 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 thirty years of not my place has not been humility. You are the last one who heard it, and that is a fact your position in the family cannot alter. The word settled that long before you sat on that mat, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in your house while you read this.

A ruling made when the facts were different

Here is the part worth sitting with, and it is not a rebuke.

Your ruling was correct when you made it. When you were thirty and there were four people alive who had more right to that story, deferring to them was exactly right, and if you had told it then you would have been taking something that was theirs.

Facts change. The last of them died in March.

A ruling made on a set of facts does not automatically survive the facts, and the trouble with a ruling you made when you were thirty is that it does not announce its own expiry. It just goes on running, in the same voice, in a situation it was never written for.

Now there is one person alive who heard it from somebody who was there, and there is a young woman with a notebook who is doing something serious, and the question is no longer whose place it is. There is nobody else standing in the place.

And I want to be careful here, because there may be parts of it that should not be told, or should be told only to certain people, or should be told in a particular way. That is real and you would know better than any page. Discretion is not the same thing as silence, and what is being described here is not a broadcast.

You have permission to tell what was given to you, and the permission comes from the giving rather than from your rank. Psalm 40 has a man offering God his unrestrained lips; His Spirit is the one who makes a man able to say the part he has never said.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the family you are in. If any part of this involves somebody being harmed, nothing here is asking anybody to absorb that. Tell one person who can act. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour.