I Have Not Told Anyone Yet

Your mother does not know.

It has been five weeks. You have spoken to her four times in those five weeks, including once for about forty minutes, and the subject has come up twice in a way that would have made it easy, and both times you moved past it.

Nobody at work knows. Two friends know because they were involved in something practical and could not not know.

And you have told yourself several things about why.

You have said it is because it was not finished, which was true for about ten days. You have said you did not want a fuss. You have said, to yourself, that you would rather just get on with it, which is the sort of thing a certain kind of man says about most things.

And underneath all of that there is something much smaller and much older, and it has never had words put on it in your whole life.

Saying a good thing out loud feels like offering it to something.

Not to God. That is not the shape of it. It is more like a superstition with no god in it at all: a sense that a thing which has not been announced is safer than a thing that has, and that the announcing is what invites the reversal.

What silence is actually protecting

Let me say the obvious thing, because sometimes the obvious thing has to be said by somebody else.

The house is already bought.

The thing being protected by the silence has already happened. It happened five weeks ago, in an office, on paper, and nothing about whether your mother knows changes a single fact about it.

So the silence is not protecting the house. It cannot reach the house. What it is protecting is you, from the size of the disappointment if something were to go wrong afterward, because a loss that nobody knew about is a smaller loss to live through.

That is the actual arrangement, and it is not a foolish one. It is a man limiting his exposure.

You have been doing something sensible rather than something faithless, and a man protecting himself from a size of disappointment has never once been a man who doubted God. The Holy Spirit is the one who asks for the speaking without ever once calling the silence unbelief, and it is written in Psalm 107 that the redeemed are to say so.

You have been limiting your exposure rather than protecting a house, and a thing already finished on paper has never once been made safer by silence. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been in four phone calls with your mother in five weeks, and it is written in Psalm 107 that let the redeemed of the Lord say so.

And here is the cost, which is real and which is being paid daily.

Your mother has not had the afternoon. The one where she finds out and tells four people and rings you back an hour later having thought of something else to ask. That afternoon exists somewhere and she has not had it, and five weeks of it not happening is five weeks she does not get back.

You have been holding back something that belongs to other people as well, and a good thing kept quiet has never once been a good thing that stayed the same size. Psalm 107 tells the redeemed to say so and gives the saying to them as an instruction, and the Spirit of God is the one who made the speaking part of the thing.

Let the redeemed of the Lord say so

Here is the verse, and the whole psalm is built on it.

Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy. (Psalm 107:2, King James Version)

Say so.

That is the whole instruction and it is two words. Not: be grateful. Not: remember. Say so, out loud, to somebody, which means using a voice in the presence of another person.

And the rest of that psalm is four long stories of people in trouble who cried out and were brought out, and after each one there is a refrain: oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men.

The whole psalm is a machine for getting things said out loud.

You have an instruction to speak rather than a suggestion, and a good thing that stays inside a man has never once been what that psalm is asking for. The Holy Spirit is the one who built the whole thing around the saying, and the written word says let the redeemed say so and repeats the refrain four times over.

And I want to be careful about one thing, because this site does not trade in it.

Nobody is telling you that announcing the house unlocks anything or that God is waiting on your testimony before He will do the next thing. That would be a mechanism, and mechanisms are what this site refuses.

The saying so is not a transaction. It is simply the shape a good thing is meant to take when it has happened to a person who is part of other people.

You are part of other people, and a good thing that happened to you has never once belonged only to you. Psalm 107 hands the instruction to the redeemed as a group rather than to individuals in private, and the Spirit of God is the one who wrote it in the plural.