Say So Before You Say Anything

Tui walked down to the water with the envelope because there were nine people up at the house and he needed about four minutes.

He has been the one who tells them things. That is how it worked out. Two years ago it became clear that somebody in that family had to be the one who took the phone calls and read the letters and worked out how to say it to his mother, and it was him, and he has done it well and it has cost him something nobody has ever asked about.

He has delivered, in twenty-six months: a diagnosis, a prognosis, a revision of a prognosis, a treatment that was not going ahead, a treatment that was, and a scan that was inconclusive in a way that took eleven days to explain to everybody individually.

He got very good at it. He worked out the order. Mother first, alone, sitting down. Then his aunt, who takes it hard and needs somebody to stay for an hour. Then the two who are overseas, at a decent hour their time. Then the ones who will hear it from somebody else if he is not quick.

And this envelope, which he had opened in the car and read twice, was the first good one.

He stood at the edge with his shoes in his hand and the sea doing what it does and he found that he had absolutely no procedure for this.

He knew exactly how to carry bad news up a beach. He had built the whole apparatus. He had a face for it and an order and a way of standing.

And he stood there and realized, in a way that took the legs out from under him slightly, that in twenty-six months of being the one who says it to everybody, nobody had ever been the one who says it to him. Not because they were unkind. Because that was the shape of it. He was the one who knew first, every time, on his own, in a parking lot or a corridor or a car.

So he did the only thing available, which was to say it out loud to the water.

He said: "It's good. It's actually good."

And then he said it again, differently, with a name on the front of it. And then he put his shoes on and went up the beach and told his mother first, sitting down, the way he always does.

You may be the one who tells people. In a family, in a team, in a friendship group, somebody usually is. And the specific cost of that job is that you always know first, always alone, and there is never anybody standing between you and the news. And nobody has ever told you that there is Somebody to say it to before you carry it up the beach.

The Redeemed Are Told To Say So

There is an opening to a psalm that is mostly quoted for its first line and whose second line is the one that does the work.

"O give thanks unto the LORD, for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever. Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy."Psalm 107:1-2

Let the redeemed say so. Say so. Not feel it, not know it, not privately acknowledge it. Say it, out loud, in a voice.

And the psalm goes on for forty more verses about specific people in specific trouble who got out of it, and it keeps coming back to the same refrain, and the whole architecture of it is people telling.

You have been carrying something that was meant to be said rather than only held. Psalm 107 puts the saying in the imperative and never once makes it optional, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line that has been sung by crowds and puts it in the mouth of one man on wet sand with his shoes in his hand.

And notice who is addressed. The redeemed of the Lord. Not the eloquent. Not the ones who are good at this. The qualification is having been got out of something, which is a qualification you already meet.

You were redeemed from the hand of the enemy and that is the whole entry requirement. That is what the written word says about who gets to speak, and it is the Spirit of God who takes the pressure off a man who has spent two years being the one who is good at saying things.

Somebody Says It To You

Now the part this article actually exists for, and it is for a specific person.

If you are the one who tells everybody, you are carrying a load that has no name and gets no thanks and is invisible to everyone including you. It is not heroic and you would be embarrassed to have it called that. It is just that you are always the first to know, and there is nobody above you in the chain.

Except there is.

That is the thing Tui found on the sand and it is worth saying plainly. When he said it out loud to the water, he was not performing a duty and he was not being pious. He was, for the first time in twenty-six months, not the top of the chain. There was Somebody who already knew, who had known before the envelope was printed, and who was glad.

You are not the one at the top of this. It is written that He knows the way that you take, which is a sentence about Somebody who has been ahead of every letter you have ever opened, and His Spirit is the one who has been in every parking lot and corridor with you while you read them alone.

And say the guard, because this reader has been given enough to carry. Nothing on this page is a requirement. There is no order, no wording, no volume, no practice, and nothing routed to any person or work anywhere. If you go straight up the beach and tell your mother and never say a word to the water, you are exactly as much His the whole way up, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming one more thing on a person who is already the one everybody relies on.