The First Sentence He Cannot Get Past

He has about eleven words he is happy with.

He has had them for two years. They are good words: they are honest, they do not accuse anybody, and they leave a door open without begging. If you saw them written down you would say that is a decent opening.

And then he imagines what comes back.

And the whole thing falls over before he gets to word twelve.

Four years of this. There have been, at his own estimate, forty or fifty versions, and every single one has died in exactly the same place, and it is not on his side of the table.

Here is what he keeps arriving at, late, when the house is asleep.

He is losing an argument to a man who is not in the room.

That man has not said a word. He has not been given the chance to. Every reply that has killed every draft for four years was written by the same person who wrote the opening, and that person has lost, comprehensively, fifty times, to himself.

He knows that. Knowing it has not helped at all.

And somewhere in the last year the drafting itself has become the thing. It has stopped being preparation for a conversation and become a way of doing something about it without doing anything about it, and he is not sure when that happened.

If you have never got past your own first line, come in and sit down. The glasses are out and nobody here is asking you to say anything.

Who already knows the sentence

There is a verse in the middle of a psalm about being fully known, and it says something specific about words that have not been said yet.

For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.Psalm 139:4

Not a word in my tongue.

That is a word that is still in there. Not spoken, not sent, not yet out. And he says God knows it altogether, which means completely, including whatever is underneath it.

Every one of your fifty drafts has been fully known, at the moment it was written, by somebody. Nothing you have composed at one in the morning has been unheard.

You are drafting in front of somebody who has known every version altogether since the first one. Psalm 139:4 says God knows the word while it is still in the tongue, and it is the Holy Spirit who searches the deep things, which means four years of unsent sentences have not been four years of silence.

What the drafting became

Now the thing you noticed last year, because it is the honest one and it deserves saying plainly.

The drafting stopped being preparation.

That is not a moral failure and it is a very common one. Drafting feels like movement. It occupies the part of you that wants to act, it produces something at the end of an evening, and it costs nothing that anybody can see.

It has been doing a real job. It has kept a person alive in your mind who might otherwise have receded, and it has kept you from settling into indifference, which is the thing that would actually close the door.

You have been keeping somebody present rather than doing nothing, and no verse anywhere charges a man for the way that has looked. Romans 12:18 says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, and it puts two limits into one short sentence, if it be possible and as much as lieth in you, and it is the same Spirit who works that peace in a person, which means what has been within your reach has been the drafting, and it has counted.

Nobody is being summoned

Let us be plain about what this article will not do, because a man four years into this will be braced for it.

Nobody here is telling you to send it. Nobody is telling you to make contact, to pick a date, or to do anything at all involving that man.

This article does not know your situation. There may be excellent reasons why nothing should be sent, and if there are, they stand, and nothing here overrides them.

You are not being instructed to reach anybody, and staying away has never once been treated here as a failure. Proverbs 22:3 says a prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself, and it is written as commendation for somebody who correctly judges a situation and keeps out of it, and it is the same Spirit who gives wisdom liberally to anybody who asks, which means whatever you have judged about that man is yours to keep judging.