Touched Is A Stronger Word Than Sorry

Somebody's front room, early evening, four lamps on because the overhead is too bright and her friend knows that now without being told.

There are two mugs and a plate of things nobody is eating.

Her friend, who is very good and has been good for two years, asks the question properly. Not how are you. The real one: what is it actually like.

And she opens her mouth to answer and finds that she has used all of them.

She has used the vise. She has used the toothache in the wrong place. She has used the phone battery at four percent and the arm that has been asleep for three years and the weather front coming through the back of the skull. She has used the one about carrying a bag of wet sand up a flight of stairs that has no top.

Every one of them was true when she found it and every one of them is now worn smooth. They have all been said. They all got the same warm face.

Thirty-nine years old, in a good chair, with the person in the world most likely to understand her waiting patiently.

And what she thinks, in the two seconds before she says something adequate, is not about her friend at all. It is this: if I cannot get it across to somebody who loves me and is trying this hard, then it is not getting across to anybody, and probably God is also being very kind about something He has only had described to Him.

If you have run out of images, you know that pause, and you know that the person opposite you deserves better than the sentence you are about to give them.

The word is touched and it was chosen carefully

Weigh it first, at its own size, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it does not get hurried.

What this costs is not the pain, or not only. It is the failure of language, which is a second loss nobody counts. It costs you the ability to be understood, which is most of what friendship is made of. It costs the images themselves, one at a time, as each one wears out. It costs your friend, quietly, because she is doing everything right and it is not working and you can both feel it. And it costs you the sentence you have started giving instead, the adequate one, which you both know is a translation of something you have stopped trying to send.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your two years made lighter before it can be spoken is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if not being able to get it across has gone as far as thinking the people who love you would have simpler evenings without the whole business of it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, the friend with the four lamps, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who put the overhead light off without being asked.

Now, Hebrews, and I want you to look at one word in it and refuse to let it be a nice word.

For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.Hebrews 4:15

Touched with the feeling. The word underneath it means to suffer along with, to be affected together with, and the writer builds it as a double negative on purpose: not one who cannot be touched. He is answering somebody's objection before they raise it.

Because the objection is exactly yours. A high priest is, by definition, somebody in a category above the room. Somebody you go to. Somebody who receives an account of your situation and then acts on it, and who does not, in any ordinary sense, know what it is like.

And the letter says: not this one.

You have a priest who is affected along with you rather than briefed about you. Hebrews 4:15 puts it as a double negative to make it unmissable, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that word off a page and lays it on a chair in a front room with four lamps.

Now, the phrase that follows, because it does the work: in all points tempted like as we are. In all points. The writer will not allow a category of human experience to be outside it. He is not saying Jesus had a hard time in general. He is saying there is no room in your life He has to have described to Him.

You have never once had to make it get across. That is written in Hebrews 4, and His Spirit in you is the one who brings a person into the presence of a priest who already has it in full.

Now let me be honest about what this does not say, because you have had two years of people saying warm things while trying very hard.

It does not say the pain is changing. Nothing here predicts your body, and I will not predict it, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and anybody who is confident about somebody else's next year is being confident about themselves.

It does not tell you your friend has failed either. She has not. She turned the overhead light off and she asked the real question, and the failure of language is not a failure of love, and this site is not going to prosecute a woman for being unable to feel somebody else's nervous system.

And it does not rank it. There is no line in that verse comparing your infirmities to anybody's. There is only the word touched, and it is applied to whatever is actually in you rather than to a version of it that got through.

You were felt exactly, at the size it is inside you, and no translation was involved. Scripture says He is touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and the same Spirit who searches the deep things is the one who carries that from a letter into a room.