I Said It Was All Right and Then I Meant It

I said it on a Thursday and I did not mean it until about three weeks later, and I want to describe those three weeks because nobody ever does.

The thing that happened does not matter very much. It was between me and Sam Hollis and it was about something he told somebody that I had told him, which is the oldest thing in the world and which does not need explaining to anybody who has ever been nine.

My dad did not make me say it. I want to be clear, because if he had made me the three weeks would be a different story. What he did was ask me on the Thursday evening what I thought I was going to do, and I said I did not know, and he said, well, there is a thing you can say and you can say it before you feel it, and it still counts.

I asked whether that was not lying.

He said no. He said that a man who says he is going to mend a fence and then mends it two weeks later has not lied, he has stated an intention and then met it, and that some sentences work like that.

So I said it. On the Thursday, in the lane, and it came out flat and it sounded flat, and Sam said all right, and we walked home not saying much.

And then here are the three weeks. In week one I did not mean it at all and I checked, which is a thing I did on purpose, like putting a finger on a bruise. Week two I mostly did not mean it and there were about two afternoons where I forgot to not mean it. Week three I noticed on a Wednesday that I had not thought about it since the Saturday.

I did not do anything in those three weeks. That is the honest part. I did not work on it. It was more like waiting for glue.

Bucky, in that same three weeks, wrecked a gate, ate a boot and got into the churchyard twice, and none of that had anything to do with anything, and I mention it because that is what three weeks of an ordinary life looks like while a thing is quietly setting.

Something already possessed

Paul writes a sentence about redemption and the tense in it is the whole comfort of it.

In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins. (Colossians 1:14)

We have. Present tense, held now. Not we will have, not we are working toward, not we shall have once something in us has caught up.

And the two things in that sentence are laid side by side as one item: redemption, even the forgiveness of sins. The second phrase explains the first rather than adding to it.

You are holding something now rather than approaching it, and Colossians 1:14 uses the present tense about the having. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as being already settled instead of as being still under way.

Which matters enormously to a person who has said a true thing and not yet felt it, because the whole worry in those weeks is that the not feeling proves the saying was false.

You have not been disqualified by the gap between saying and feeling. The written word puts the possession in the present and never asks how the possessor feels about it, and His Spirit is what makes an unfelt fact hold weight in the meantime.

What the meantime is for

There is a passage in the same letter that describes the process in a way farmers understand immediately.

As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him: Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught. (Colossians 2:6, 7)

Rooted. Roots go down slowly and nobody watches them do it, and there is no day on which a root can be observed to have gone further.

And built up is a construction word and stablished is a settling word, which is what a wall does over a winter. Three separate images and every one of them is about something happening over time without a person supervising it.

You are being described as something growing rather than something switched on. Colossians 2:7 uses three slow images in one verse, and the Spirit of God is what makes the slowness a design rather than a failure.

And the instruction at the front of it is as ye have received, so walk, which means the walking comes out of a thing already received rather than earning it.

You have received first and are walking second, in that order. Colossians 2:6 puts the receiving before the walking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a letter into a boy checking a bruise in week one.