I Wonder What They Say After I Leave

The meeting ends and you stand up and thank everybody.

And then the door closes behind you, and about four steps down the corridor the other conversation starts. The one in your head. The one where they look at each other and somebody says something and somebody else agrees.

You have a specific sentence for this. Most people do. It is short, it is in a particular voice, and you have been hearing it for years.

And the thing about that sentence is that it is unfalsifiable. You cannot check it. You will never be in that room. So it sits there permanently, unchallenged, doing the work of evidence without ever having to be any.

I want to look at who wrote it, because it was not them.

And it has never once been checked, which is the entire problem and also the reason it has lasted. A thing that cannot be verified cannot be disproved either, so it sits there permanently, accumulating weight, being treated as information by somebody who has never had a single piece of evidence for it.

The LORD is on my side

There is a line in Psalm 118 that takes a slightly startling approach to the opinions of other people.

The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me? (Psalm 118:6, King James Version)

The question at the end is not rhetorical bravado. It is an actual question, and the psalmist is inviting you to answer it, in specifics.

What can man do. Not: does man matter. Not: are people unkind. What, concretely, can a person do to me here.

And in a staff room, on a Tuesday, at four in the afternoon, the honest answer is a short list. They can form an opinion. They can write a sentence in a file. They can be slightly brisker next time.

That is a real list. It is not nothing. And it is very much smaller than the thing you have been carrying down that corridor for eleven years.

You are being asked to name what can actually be done, and scripture has never once left a person's fear unexamined and unspecified. Psalm 118:6 asks for the concrete list, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person willing to write it down instead of carrying it as a cloud.

And look at the order of the sentence. The LORD is on my side comes first. The fearlessness is a consequence, not a personality trait.

You were never expected to generate courage out of yourself, and no verse has ever once asked a person to be brave before it told them who was standing with them. The written word puts the presence first and the not fearing second, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies the first half.

You are the author of that sentence

Here is the part that usually does the work, and I want to say it gently because it can land as an accusation and it is not one.

You wrote that sentence.

Not deliberately. But somebody chose those words, and somebody chose that tone, and somebody chose which of them says it and which one agrees. And none of those choices were made in a staff room.

You have been reading your own handwriting and calling it a transcript, and an invented line has never once come back with any information in it. Psalm 118:6 asks what a person can actually do, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows somebody where a sentence came from.

And here is the tell, which most people recognize immediately.

The sentence is usually about you rather than about your child. Listen to it again. In most cases the imagined staff room is not discussing a seven year old's reading at all. It is discussing the parent.

Which means the sentence is not a fear about school. It is a fear about being found out, and it has borrowed a staff room to say it in.

You have been afraid of something that has never once required a school to exist in order to frighten you. The written word separates what can be done from what is imagined, and the Spirit of God is the one who identifies what a person is actually afraid of at four in the afternoon.

You were never being assessed in that room, and a meeting about a child has never once been a hearing about the adult sitting in it. Psalm 118:6 asks the question in the concrete, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a worry from expanding to fill a room nobody can see into.

Write it down and label it

So here is the assignment, and it is one word long at the end.

Tonight, write down the sentence. The one you imagine. Exactly as you hear it, in the wording you hear it in.

Then, beside it, write one word: invented.

That is the whole exercise. Not disproved, because it cannot be disproved. Not unfair. Invented, which is simply accurate, because it was made up and there is no recording anywhere of anybody saying it.

You have one accurate word available tonight, and an accurate word has never once needed to be a comforting one to do its work. Psalm 118:6 asks the concrete question and lets the answer be a short list, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a person willing to write down what is true rather than what is soothing.

Some of you will resist that word, and the resistance is worth noticing rather than pushing through. Most of us would rather believe a bad thing that is real than admit to having manufactured it, because manufactured means we have been doing this to ourselves.

But manufactured also means it can stop, and a real one could not.

Psalm 118:6 asks what man can actually do and lets the answer be small, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at a table where somebody writes one honest word.

You are permitted to label your own sentence accurately, and calling a thing invented has never once been the same as pretending nothing is wrong. The written word puts the presence of God before the question about people, and the Spirit of God is the one who stands beside the word as it gets written.

You have the authority to stop writing their lines for them, and nobody has ever once been obliged to supply a conversation they were not present for. Psalm 118:6 makes the question concrete rather than atmospheric, and it is the Holy Spirit who empties a staff room a person has furnished themselves.