The Sentence I Helped Write

It is a nice leaflet. That is the trouble.

Six pages, decent paper, photographs of actual people rather than stock ones, and Bree was on the group of four who put it together over about five months, and she did the words for pages two and three.

Page two is the history.

And on page two, in the middle, there is a sentence that reads: when it became clear that others were no longer willing to hold to the original vision, this congregation continued in it.

She wrote that.

She remembers the afternoon. She remembers thinking she had solved something, because the previous draft named the year and the disagreement and read heavy, and hers reads light and moves the reader on.

Everybody liked it. One of the four said it was the best line on the page.

It has been in print four years. There are about nine hundred of them out there and one is in the rack at the hospital chaplaincy.

And Bree, who is thirty-eight, has read that sentence perhaps forty times since, always alone, always the same way, and what she now sees in it is not what she saw in the meeting.

Others were no longer willing.

There is a whole verdict in there. It is delivered warmly, in the passive, without naming anybody, and it does not sound like a verdict, and that is precisely what makes it one that nobody can answer.

She has not raised it. She has been on that group four years and they are her friends and they would take it seriously, and the leaflets cost about six hundred pounds.

And what she has not said to anybody, not even her husband, is: I did not soften the history. I moved it onto somebody else and made it sound gentle.

And you may have written something like that. Or approved it. Or said it, warmly, at a door, to somebody new.

Paul separates the sorrow that produces something from the sorrow that does not

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it four years and it was never yours to carry alone.

You are not condemned by a sentence on page two. You never were. Scripture makes a careful distinction between two kinds of sorrow and says exactly what each one produces, and it is the Holy Spirit, not four years of private rereading, who turns sorrow into anything. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy and there are nine hundred of them out there.

Now hear it, and hear that the good kind leaves no regret.

Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.2 Corinthians 7:10

Leaves no regret.

That is the test he gives you, and it is a strange one until you sit with it. The sorrow that is from God moves. It goes somewhere, it turns into a change, and when you look back at it you are not sorry you felt it. That is written, and His Spirit is the one who does the moving.

The other kind circles. It rereads page two forty times, alone, and produces nothing, and it feels like conscience because it hurts.

And notice he is writing to people he had already made sorry once, and he is glad about it now, and he tells them why: because it worked, and it did not damage them.

The sorrow you have been carrying is meant to go somewhere. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who moves it, and He has never once wanted a woman to circle a sentence for four years.

Now let me be careful here, because there are ditches on both sides and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says the four of you were dishonest. You were not. You were trying to write a warm page for people who would pick it up in a hospital. Warmth is a real duty, Scripture would not have you cold with a stranger at a door, and His Spirit is the one who gave you the instinct.

And nothing here says the sentence is the worst thing in the world. It is one line in a nice leaflet and nobody has been crushed by it, and the impulse behind it was hospitality, and I am not going to inflate it so this page has something to be dramatic about.

The point is narrower and it is exactly what you saw on the fortieth reading, and Scripture says the useful sorrow moves, and His Spirit is the one who moves it.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You did not do something a good person would not do.

Moving a hard thing onto somebody else while sounding gentle is the most ordinary maneuver there is, and you caught it, which most people never do. His Spirit is the one who showed it to you on a reading you were not expecting, and He does not show a person something in order to leave them holding it.