I Like Sitting With One Of Them More

There is no acceptable way to say this, so I will say it for you.

One of them is easier to sit with. The ten minutes goes faster. There is less bracing beforehand, and when it is over you do not need five minutes in another room.

And with the other one, something in you starts getting ready at about six o'clock.

You have never said this to anybody. You are not going to. And what makes it heavy is not the preference itself. It is the total absence of anywhere to put it, because every possible listener would either reassure you, which would be useless, or think slightly less of you, which would be unbearable.

So it stays in, and it grows, and it is doing more damage in there than it would anywhere else.

Search me, O God, and know my heart

There is a request at the end of Psalm 139 that is braver than most of us are.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts. (Psalm 139:23, King James Version)

Search me. That is a request to be examined, made by somebody who has already spent an entire psalm saying that God knows everything about him anyway.

Which tells you what the request is actually for. It is not for information. God has the information. It is for the searching to be done with the person present, and out loud, rather than quietly in the dark on their own.

You have been given somewhere to bring a thing that is already known, and no honest sentence has ever once told God anything He did not have. Psalm 139:23 asks for the search rather than offering the facts, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that available to a man with nowhere else to take it.

And notice: try me, and know my thoughts. Thoughts, specifically. Not deeds. The request covers exactly the category the thing you are carrying belongs to.

You were never in the wrong for the thought, and scripture has never once treated a thought as a verdict on the person having it. The written word invites the examination of thoughts by name, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates having something from choosing it.

A preference about an evening

Now let me be precise about what is actually in play, because the thing being called a preference is not the thing it is feared to be.

Nobody in this house prefers one child. If somebody handed a father a fire and told him to pick, there would be no picking, and every man reading this knows that with total certainty.

What you have is a preference about an activity. One version of that ten minutes is easier than the other version. That is a report on the ten minutes, not on the person in it.

You have been reading a fact about an evening as a fact about a child, and the two have never once been the same measurement. Psalm 139:23 asks for the thoughts to be examined rather than executed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference for somebody who has been unable to.

And there is a reason one of them is harder, and it is worth going after rather than being ashamed of.

Usually it is one of three things. The harder child resembles their father in the exact place he finds himself difficult. Or the harder child needs something he is not sure he has got. Or something happened once, years ago, that has never been repaired, and the evening still carries it.

Every one of those is addressable. None of them is a preference for a person.

You are able to find out why one of them is harder, and that has never once been available while the whole thing was unsayable. The written word asks for a search rather than a confession, and the Spirit of God is the one who goes looking with a man rather than at him.

You were never a father with a favorite, and an unequal difficulty has never once been an unequal love. Psalm 139:23 invites the examination of the thoughts themselves, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the examining without condemning the one who asked for it.

Say it, then go and sit

So here is the assignment, and it has two halves and they happen in the same hour.

First, on your own, say the sentence out loud to God. The true one.

I find it easier to be with him than with her.

Do not soften it. Do not add a defense. Do not follow it with a request. And then, if you want the harder version, add the second sentence: search me, and tell me why.

You have twenty seconds available for a thing that has run for three years, and no honest sentence has ever once needed to be a long one. Psalm 139:23 is two short clauses and asks for everything, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives what nobody else has ever been told.

That is the first half, and it takes about twenty seconds.

Then go and sit with the harder one for ten minutes.

Not as penance. Not to balance anything. Go because a thing that has been said out loud once does not sit in the room the same way afterward, and a different man arrives in that chair than the one who sat there last night.

You have been given the order deliberately, and the sitting has never once been a payment for the saying. Psalm 139:23 asks for the search first and leaves the living to follow, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in the chair for the second half.

You may notice, in that ten minutes, what the actual difficulty is. Plenty of people do, and it is usually smaller and more specific than they expected.

Psalm 139:23 asks for the search and the trying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a chair with a man who has just said a hard true thing to nobody in the room.

You are permitted to say the worst sentence and then go and do the right thing anyway, and the order has never once been the other way round. The written word asks for the examination first, and the Spirit of God is the one who does it while a man is sitting at a table with a child.

You have ten minutes to give tonight that are not a payment for anything, and no evening has ever once been owed to a child as compensation. Psalm 139:23 invites the search rather than demanding the penance, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the second half a genuine act.