His Name Is in the Newsletter Again

It comes on the second Thursday and you have never once unsubscribed.

You could. It takes four seconds and there is a link at the bottom of every one of them. You have hovered over it. You have told your wife twice that you are going to. And on the second Thursday you open it, and you read the whole thing, and about two thirds of the way down there is usually something with his name in it.

This month it is a photograph. Him at a thing, holding a small glass award, next to a man you both used to know.

You read the caption twice. Then you read the paragraph. Then you sit at your desk with a cold coffee and you say, in your head, the sentence you have been saying for six years, the one that begins that man and ends with a verdict so well worn you could do it in your sleep.

He took the company. That is the plain fact of it. He took it in a way that was clever rather than illegal, and he took the story with it, and the story that went round was that you had lost interest, and enough people believed it that you stopped correcting them in about the second year.

You rebuilt. That should be said. You have something smaller now and it is honest and it is yours and you sleep better than you did.

And it is still the second Thursday, and you still open it, and that man still gets forty minutes of your evening every single month.

Bless, and curse not

Come and sit back from that desk a minute. I am not going to tell you what he did was fine and I am not going to ask you how you feel about it.

Let me be clear before anything else, because Scripture will not let me be vague and the Spirit will not let me be glib: what happened to you happened. I am not softening it, and nothing in this article requires you to say it was less than it was. He took it. People believed a version. You carried the cost of that in silence for years. That is not in dispute here.

Now let me show you a sentence that was written for exactly this and is almost always read as if it were about somebody else.

Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not.Romans 12:14

Look at how bare it is. There is no clause about whether they deserve it. There is no instruction to make contact. There is no requirement to feel differently, no timetable for reconciliation, no suggestion that you ring anybody or attend anything or clear the air. It is about what comes out of your mouth about a person, and nothing else.

And notice the second half of what is written, because it is not a repetition. Bless, and curse not. Two instructions, and the second one is the one that changes your Thursday. It is not merely that you are asked to say something good. It is that you are asked to stop saying the other thing.

You have been given the right to take that sentence out of your mouth, and you had it long before this month's newsletter arrived. That is not me handling a wronged man gently. That is what is written, and what the verse instructs and what it deliberately leaves out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that plain and lays it on a man with a cold coffee at half past nine.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing somebody who wronged you. When you say a blessing over that man, you are not endorsing him, and you are not withdrawing anything, and you are not saying the story was true. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a person made in His image. Your mouth is a door. God is the one going through it. Which means it takes nothing off your account and it puts nothing on his.

A blessing spoken about him tonight does not settle anything between you, and it was never designed to. Scripture says vengeance belongs to God and He will repay (Romans 12:19), which is written three verses down from the blessing instruction and in the same breath, and the Spirit put them that close together on purpose. The case is not being dropped. It is being handed to the only judge who has the file.

What the verdict is actually costing

Now let me name the thing that has been happening in you, and I want to be careful with it because it is not a moral failing.

That sentence you say in your head has become a groove, and what is written has a name for the groove and the Spirit has a use for the mouth it lives in. Six years of a rehearsed verdict does something to a man's mouth: it becomes the fastest route in there. It arrives before you have decided to think it, on a second Thursday, in a car park when you see a certain make of car, when somebody mentions the industry at a wedding.

You have not been nursing it. You have been storing it, which feels responsible, because a man who lets go of the verdict too easily can look like a man who was never really wronged.

But what is written never once made a verdict the evidence that a wrong occurred, and the Spirit is not asking you to pretend anything. He is asking for your mouth back.

Your mouth is not a courtroom, and you were never appointed to hold that case open. It is written that God will repay, and that He says so Himself in the first person (Romans 12:19), which means the file has an owner, and the owner is not a man at a desk on a Thursday night. The same Spirit who breathed that line is in the room with you.

And hear what I am not doing, because this is where a man in your position gets sold something and I will not do it. I am not telling you to contact him. Not a message, not a coffee, not an approach at an industry event, and nothing in this article implies you owe him a single word to his face. Blessing is not reconciliation. It is not permission. It does not reopen a door and it does not require you to be in a room with anybody.

What you say about a man in your own kitchen is a real thing, and it is complete without him ever knowing it happened. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and it does not need to reach that man's ears in order to have been said.