Forty People and Nobody Who Knows

He has run the sound desk for eleven years, and there is not a person in that building who could not tell you his name.

They say it warmly, too. That is the thing. Fifty people a week say his name warmly. He gets asked about his knee. He gets asked whether the new radio microphones are behaving. A woman he barely knows brings him a coffee, without asking, exactly how he takes it, because she noticed once about six years ago and has remembered ever since, and that is a real kindness and he is not ungrateful for it.

In March he moved out of his house.

He has been sleeping in his brother's back room since, on a bed that is too short, with his shirts on a rail behind the door because there is nowhere to hang them properly. He gets up at five to be out before the family needs the bathroom. He drives to work an hour early and sits in the industrial estate with the radio on.

Nobody in that building knows. Not the man he sets up beside every week. Not the woman with the coffee. Not the leaders, who are good people and would drop everything, and who are also very busy, and who have never had a reason to ask.

He has not hidden it, exactly. There is just no moment in the week where it would go. The five minutes before the service is about the microphones. The five minutes after is about the recording. And, honestly, on a Sunday morning in a warm room full of people saying his name, the sentence sounds so heavy that he cannot make himself be the one to put it on the floor.

So it comes back to the industrial estate with him, and it sits in the passenger seat, and the radio does most of the talking.

The verse assumes there is a one another

Read this slowly, because there is a small word in it doing an enormous amount of work.

Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.James 5:16

Take that where you are sitting. You are already fully known by One who did not step back in March. The word says confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the healing.

Each other.

The instruction is not confess. Anybody can confess into the ceiling of a car at six in the morning, and men do it every day, and there is something in it and it is not nothing. The instruction is confess to each other, which quietly assumes a thing this man does not have. It assumes there is somebody who has the facts.

And notice, it is not assuming a crowd. It never says confess to the congregation. Two people can be an each other. Three certainly can. The whole New Testament runs on a very small number of people who actually knew, and the movement that has this website's name on it ran on the same fuel: a warmed heart, and then a handful of people in a room who asked one another the truth every week and did not let go of the answer.

Nobody is going to hand you a format tonight. There is no evening you have to attend, no course, no six week thing, no structure this article is quietly steering you toward, and if you have tried the structures and they did not fit you, that is not a mark against you.

What is on the table is a much older and much smaller idea. Two or three people who have the actual facts.

Now let me say the hard part, kindly, because the hard part is where you actually live.

The reason nobody knows is not that they are shallow and it is not that you are secretive. It is that being known has a cost that has to be paid by exactly one person, and it is you, and it is paid at the start.

Somebody has to say the sentence first. Out loud. Badly. Into a silence that has not been prepared for it, at a bad moment, to a person who might respond poorly, and there is no version of this where the other party goes first, because they do not know there is anything to go first about.

That is not a character defect in you. That is the actual shape of the thing, and it is heavy, and it is why so many good men are in the industrial estate at seven in the morning.

But here is what I want you to see, and it is the reason I am not going to leave you with a technique.

You have been carrying this as though it were a private matter that has stayed private by accident. It has not. It has stayed private because you have been protecting people from it, and you have been doing that out of love, and it has cost you everything it was always going to cost.

And there is one more thing, and it is the true one. You are already fully known. Not the version. All of it, the back room and the short bed and the five o'clock, and the God who knows all of it has not backed away one inch, and He never has, on any day since March. Being known by two or three people is not you becoming known. It is you catching up with a fact.

And if you have nobody at all right now, hear this plainly: that is not a failure of yours and it is not a sentence on your character. Some people arrive at this page with no one, for reasons that were never in their hands, and the answer to that is not a lecture. It is that you are known by God tonight in a room where nobody else is, and that is real and not a consolation prize, and one name is still the size of the next step.

Before the story, take this where you sit: you are already fully known by One who did not step back in March. His word says confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the healing in that arrangement, and never the structure around it.