The Testimony That Is Five Years Old

Every so often, in a group like that, the question comes round. Somebody asks it in one form or another, and everybody takes a turn, and when it gets to him he has an answer.

It is a good answer. It is true. It is about a genuinely hard stretch that happened about seven years ago, and about what God did in it, and it is the sort of thing that makes a room go quiet in the right way, and he tells it well because he has told it a number of times.

He has been in this group five years.

And on a Tuesday, about three weeks ago, somebody asked the question again, and he watched himself reach for it. That was the whole event. He did not say anything different. He gave the same account he always gives, in more or less the same words, and it landed the way it always lands, and a man across the circle said something kind afterward.

And he drove home understanding that he has a version of himself that he deploys.

Not a false one. That is the part that has kept him circling this for three weeks. Every word of it is true. He is not a fraud and there is nothing invented in it and he could produce witnesses to all of it. It is not a lie.

It is a wall made of true things, which is the most effective kind, because nobody can take it down and it cannot be argued with and it satisfies the question completely so that no follow-up ever comes.

Five people in that room believe they know him. They would say so. They pray for him. They would come at two in the morning, and he does not doubt that for a second, and that is what makes the whole thing so uncomfortable, because they would come at two in the morning for a man who does not exist in the present tense.

He has given them a man from seven years ago, in fine detail, five years running.

And you know that circle. You would rather be looked at than known, and you have found the safest possible way to do it, which is to hand people something true.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not a fraud and the story you tell is not a lie. Psalm 139:1 says O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me, and the searching there is finished and thorough, and the Holy Spirit is in this room with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The sentence ends where you would not expect

There is a line everybody has heard at weddings, and the last clause of it is the one this article lives in.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.1 Corinthians 13:12

Read the ending. Then shall I know even as also I am known.

The comparison is not between what he knows now and what he will know later. It is between what he knows and how he is known. And the second one is in the present tense: as also I am known. Right now. Already.

So the state of affairs the verse describes is this. Being fully known is not the thing coming later. That part is already in place. What is coming later is that he will catch up, and know the way he is currently being known.

Which reverses the whole anxiety of a man in a small group with a curated account. You have been managing what people know, and behind that is a background sense that being fully known is a future event to be prepared for or avoided.

It is not a future event. It has already happened, from one direction, completely, and the psalmist and Paul both talk about it as a settled fact rather than an approaching one.

You are already known in full, and the only part still coming is you catching up. The written word puts being known in the present and the knowing in the future, which means the exposure you have been managing was over before you built the wall; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a front room with the chairs still in a circle.

And notice the middle of it. Face to face. That is the image the whole verse turns on, and it is not the language of inspection. It is the language of two people close enough to see each other properly.

A wall of true things

I want to be exact about the mechanism, because you have half seen it and stopped short of the part that matters.

A wall made of lies is unstable. It requires maintenance, it can be checked, and the person behind it knows what they are doing. Very few people manage one for five years.

A wall made of true things is entirely different. It requires no maintenance. It cannot be caught out. And crucially, the person behind it does not experience themselves as concealing anything, because every individual brick is honest, and so there is never a moment of conscience that flags what is happening.

That is why this took five years and a Tuesday to notice. There was nothing to notice. You have not been lying to anybody, at any point, and if you had been you would have caught it in the first six months.

You were not concealing anything, and a wall of true things sets off no alarms. 1 Corinthians 13:12 has Paul admitting I know in part, in the first person, in the middle of the most famous passage he ever wrote, which is not the sentence of a man presenting a finished account of himself; His Spirit is the one who let you watch yourself reach for it three weeks ago.

And here is the second half, and I am going to be careful, because this is the last category on this site and the temptation here is to tell you what to say and to whom.

I am not going to. Nothing on this page will tell you what to disclose, or to whom, or when, or that it should be your wife or one of those five. You know things about that room that no page can know, and the choosing of both the thing and the person is yours entirely and stays yours.

You are choosing both the what and the whom, and nobody else has a vote in either. Ecclesiastes 4:9 says two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their work, and it names a number rather than a candidate; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has been in that circle every week for five years.

The present tense is the whole ask

Here is the practical thing, and it is narrower than what you have been dreading.

You have been dreading disclosure, and picturing something large and difficult, and postponing it for three weeks because it is large.

But look at what is actually missing from that room. Not a confession. Not the hardest thing you know about yourself. The present tense.

Every word you have given those people is about seven years ago. What none of them have is one true sentence about this month. And a sentence about this month can be extremely ordinary. It does not have to be the worst thing. It only has to be current, and true, and about you.

That is a considerably smaller act than the one you have been putting off, and it is the one that would actually change what those five people know.

You have something small and current available to say, and it is a different act from the one you have been dreading. Scripture says now I know in part, and Paul says it about himself, in public, as an ordinary admission; the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you in that room for five years while nothing current got said.

So the circle is not a place where you have been dishonest. It is five people who would come at two in the morning, and a true story told faithfully, and a man in it who has not said one sentence in the present tense in five years.

And if what is under this is heavier than a page can carry, do not carry it alone while you decide about anybody. Find a real person this week, one who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing. If it has gone somewhere darker than tired, do not wait: in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a person will answer.