Cling to the Rock

A man calls his closest friend every Sunday night and gives him the same three sentences. Work is good. Marriage is good. Feeling closer to God than I have in years. His friend says that is great to hear, man, proud of you, and hangs up, and neither of them notices that the three sentences have not changed in eleven months, word for word, the way a man recites an address he stopped living at a long time ago.

Nobody around him suspects anything, because nobody around him is in a position to see what he has not said. A friend on the other end of a phone call believes what he is told, mostly, because doubting a Sunday night check in is not a thing people are built to do to each other. He can keep the same three sentences running for years without much effort at all, and for years, he does.

I know a different kind of accounting now, one that does not stop at whatever I am willing to say on a Sunday phone call. It has to answer to something that already knows the parts I have not said out loud, so the accounting is not a report delivered to someone who has to take my word for it. It is a reckoning with what is actually true, whether the phone rings that week or not.

For me that something is God. I am not telling you it has to be yours. I have sat across from too many people to hand one man’s answer to another and call it finished. But I can tell you what mine looks like, on a specific morning, kneeling on a specific floor, saying out loud the one sentence I had left out of every Sunday call for eleven months, because the floor does not hang up and does not say proud of you before it has heard the whole thing.

Whatever the rock is for you, and most people already know, even after years of finding reasons not to look straight at it, the test is the same. It has to be something outside your own opinion of yourself, because your own opinion of yourself is the easiest instrument in the house to bend. You can talk yourself into almost anything alone in a room with no other voice in it. You need something that does not soften just because you are tired, or embarrassed, or three sentences into explaining why this time was different.

Shame is what happens when the reckoning has no grace built into it, and shame does not change a man, it only teaches him to get better at the phone call. What I found, on that floor, on that specific morning, was that grace did not excuse what I said. It made it possible to keep saying true things after that morning instead of just the one time, because the floor was still there the next morning too, and the one after that, and it never once handed me a verdict I could not survive.

That Sunday phone call still happens most weeks. Work is good. Marriage is good. But there is a floor now that hears the rest of it first, before the phone ever rings, and the man dialing his friend’s number these days is not the same one who used to recite an address he had stopped living at.