The Call I Did Not Answer

Nine forty on a Tuesday. He was in a meeting that did not matter, and he looked at the screen, and he let it go.

He would have called back at lunch. That was the plan and it was a perfectly ordinary plan and he had made it a hundred times before with the same person and it had never once mattered.

That was four years ago.

He is fifty-one. He is not a careless man and nobody who knows him would say he was. He is the sort of person who checks on people, which is the detail that has made this unbearable rather than merely sad: it was one of the very few times in his adult life that he did not.

And here is what people have said to him, hundreds of times by now, every one of them meaning well and most of them not knowing what they were handing him. You have to forgive yourself.

His wife has said it. His daughter said it once, at Christmas, in a way that made it clear she had been working up to it. Two men from his church have said it, kindly, both of them with a hand on his arm. Everybody says it and everybody says it as though it were a step, like turning off a valve, and he has never once had the least idea how to do it.

Because he knows what it is to be forgiven by God. That is not the missing piece. He took the whole thing there in the first year, on his knees, in the small hours, and something real happened and it has never come undone. He could tell you the doctrine and he would be right.

What he cannot find is the second office. Where is it, what is the form, who receives it, and how would a man ever know it had been accepted. So four years have gone by in which he has been failing to complete a transaction that not one of those kind people could describe if you asked them to.

Maybe you have been told to forgive yourself. And maybe you nodded and went home and had no idea what you were meant to actually do, and then quietly added the failure to the pile.

Sit down out here on the porch. Nothing coming is going to hand you a procedure.

The second office does not exist

Let me tell you the thing nobody has told you, and it may take a day or two to decide whether it is a relief or an offense.

There is no such transaction.

Not difficult. Not slow. Not something you have not managed yet. It is not there. Nowhere in Scripture does a person forgive himself. Nobody does it, nobody is told to do it, and the phrase does not occur. It arrived in ordinary speech in the last century or so, usually out of the mouths of people trying to name something genuine, and the thing they are pointing at is real, but it is not a second pardon and there is no counter you have been failing to get to.

You have not been failing at anything, and Scripture never once places a second forgiveness between a man and his rest, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you unable to find an office nobody ever built. Four years of not completing an impossible errand is not a defect. It is the correct outcome.

Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand.Romans 14:4

Read the last clause, because most people stop at the first. He will be upheld. The verse does not merely remove your standing to judge; it tells you what happens to the man in the dock once you are out of the way. You are upheld right now, as you read this, and Romans 14 is where that is written, and it is His Spirit and not your own review of the file who does the upholding.

What has actually been going on

So if the transaction does not exist, what have four years been? Something real, with a name, and the name is not forgiveness.

A court has been in session.

It sits most mornings, usually early. There is a bench and you sit on it. There is a defendant and it is also you. There is a prosecutor with the file at his fingertips, who can tell you exactly what the screen said and exactly what was going through your head when you turned it face down, and he is you as well. There is no defense, because whenever one is offered you rule it out as excuse making. And no verdict has ever come down, because a court without jurisdiction cannot deliver one. It can only sit again tomorrow.

That is the actual shape of the last four years. Not an unfinished forgiveness. An endless trial in a room with no authority in it.

You were never appointed to that bench, and 1 Corinthians 4 says Paul would not even judge himself but left it to the Lord, and it is the Spirit who lifts a man out of a chair he was never qualified to sit in. If Paul stepped down from that seat, it was never built for a man in a meeting on a Tuesday.

Not a step to add, a bench to get off

Here is the turn, and it is a subtraction and not an addition.

The trouble was never a second thing left undone. It is a first thing that was never yours to do: keeping a case open that God closed. And a man cannot close a case he had no authority to open. What he can do is stand up and leave.

So the move is not to forgive yourself. The move is to say out loud that you are not the judge, and then to say who is. That is all of it. It is not a technique, there is no wording to get right, and it will not feel like an achievement. It is a man getting off a bench and walking out of a room that was never a courtroom.

You have a case that was closed by the only judge with standing in it, and it is written that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit is what makes that a fact about a man who looked at a screen and let it go.