The Thing I Broke That Nobody Had Missed Yet

The thermos lived on the third shelf in the tool shed and it had been there my whole life and probably longer, and it was green, and the inside of it was glass, which I did not know until the inside of it was on the floor.

I was getting a jar down. Bucky came in behind me, which he does, because the tool shed smells interesting and because there is nothing in there he has not already tried to eat. He did not knock it off. I knocked it off, reaching, and I want that clear because it would have been very easy in this house to arrange for it to be otherwise.

It made a sound like a bag of ice. The outside was fine. The outside was completely fine, which is the whole problem, because you can put a green thermos back on a shelf and it looks exactly like a green thermos.

So I put it back on the shelf.

And then I spent two days doing arithmetic. Here is the arithmetic. Dad uses that thermos maybe four times a year, in the winter, for the long days. It was August. That is a minimum of four months and possibly seven, and by then anybody could have knocked it, including Bucky, who has knocked over more things in this shed than I have, which is a fact and not an excuse and I know the difference.

And there was a very good chance nobody would ever ask. That is the honest truth of it. There was a real, live, available future in which nobody ever knew.

I got about a day and a half into that future and I did not like it in there.

I told him on the Thursday evening. I said I broke the green thermos and it looks fine and it is not fine. And he said, well, that is a shame, thanks for telling me, and then he asked whether I wanted to help him find out if you can get the glass part on its own.

You can. They cost about nine dollars. We did it in September.

The word in the middle is faithful

Everybody knows the first half of this verse and almost nobody looks at the two adjectives.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)

Faithful. That is not a word about kindness. Faithful means somebody does the thing they said, reliably, whether or not they feel like it on the day, which is the reason the word gets used about God rather than about moods.

And just is stranger still, because just is a word about fairness and law. It is not saying He is nice enough to forgive. It is saying that forgiving is the correct outcome, because of something already settled elsewhere.

You are not asking a favor of somebody who might be in the mood. 1 John 1:9 uses faithful and just rather than kind and generous, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes those two words read as ground under a person rather than as theology.

There is a specific fear a child has about telling, and it does not sound like the fear an adult would guess. It is not mostly fear of punishment. It is the fear of changing how somebody looks at you, permanently, in a way that cannot be got back.

You have not been about to become somebody different in the eyes of anybody who matters. The written word attaches cleansing to the confessing rather than a mark, and His Spirit is what makes cleansing sound like the whole of it instead of like the start of a probation.

The verse before it is the one that does the work

Everybody quotes verse nine. Verse seven is the one that explains why verse nine is not asking for a performance.

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. (1 John 1:7)

Notice what walking in the light is not. It is not being without anything to confess. If it were, the sentence would not need to end the way it ends.

Walking in the light is being where the light is, with the thing you did, rather than in the shed with it. And the promise attached is in the present tense: cleanseth, continuous, ongoing, not a single event a person has to get right.

You are able to walk into the light carrying the thing rather than having to sort it out first. 1 John 1:7 puts the cleansing inside the walking rather than before it, and the Spirit of God is what makes that order the difference between coming forward and staying put.

And John writes the whole passage to people he is fond of, which is worth noticing, because the tone of a letter is part of what it says.

You have been written to warmly by somebody who assumed you would have something to bring. That is what 1 John 1:8 does when it says the opposite claim is self deception, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as company rather than as an accusation.