I Had No Word For It

Gideon has a word for almost everything and has never had one for this.

That is his whole working life. He teaches languages and has done for twenty-six years, and his particular pleasure, the thing he would talk about at a dinner if anybody let him, is the gap where a language has a word another one does not: the exact term for the light through leaves, the word for the ache of an absent person, the one that means the awkwardness of a conversation that will not end.

He collects them. He has a notebook.

And there is a situation in his own life, ongoing for about eleven years, that he has never been able to describe in one sentence in any language he has.

He has tried. He has said versions of it to his wife perhaps thirty times and every attempt comes out either too weak or unfair. If he says the person is controlling, that is not true and it is a slander on somebody who has never done a controlling thing in his life. If he says the arrangement is fine, that is also not true, and he knows it in his body every time he walks into that building.

So for eleven years he has done what people do when the word is missing.

He has concluded that the thing is not real.

That is what happens. If you cannot say it, and every attempt to say it comes out as a caricature, the honest and modest conclusion is that there is nothing there and you are in a mood. Gideon is an honest and modest man, so he has drawn that conclusion approximately once a quarter for eleven years.

Then in the spring he was reading Deuteronomy for a completely unrelated reason, and he came to the passage about kings, and he stopped in the middle of a paragraph and did not move for some time.

Because it was there. Not the situation. The distinction. The thing he has been feeling for eleven years, set out plainly in a legal code three thousand years old, in about four lines.

He wrote it in the notebook that evening, on the page where he keeps the untranslatable ones.

Now let me ask you what yours is.

Because if this is you, there is a sentence you have never managed. About a person, a room, an arrangement. You have tried it aloud and it came out too harsh, and you apologized for it, and the next time you tried it it came out as nothing at all. And somewhere in the last few years you decided that a thing you cannot say is a thing that is not there.

The king writes out his own copy

There is a law in Deuteronomy about what happens if Israel one day wants a king, and it is strange, because it does not talk about armies or borders. It talks about a book.

Now it shall come about when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself a copy of this law on a scroll in the presence of the Levitical priests. It shall be with him and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, by carefully observing all the words of this law and these statutes, that his heart may not be lifted up above his countrymen.Deuteronomy 17:18 to 20

Sit with what is being described, because it is not a devotional practice.

He shall write for himself a copy. By hand. The king. Not commission one, not receive one: write it out, personally, and Jewish tradition took this literally for centuries.

It shall be with him and he shall read it all the days of his life. Not once at the coronation. Daily, permanently, for as long as he holds the office.

That his heart may not be lifted up above his countrymen. And there is the reason, stated outright. The daily copying is not for his information. He knows the law. It is so that he does not drift into being a different kind of creature from the people he governs.

Here is the distinction, and it is the one you have not had words for.

The question was never whether an authority is kind or unkind, competent or incompetent, nice to you or not nice to you. Those are the categories you have been trying to use, and they do not fit, which is why every sentence you attempted came out as either slander or nothing.

The question is whether they are under the same text as everybody else.

A king who writes out the law by hand every day is under the same document as the farmer. He can be strict, he can be wrong, he can be difficult company. He is not a different kind of thing.

An authority that is not under the text is not necessarily cruel. It may be extremely pleasant. It is simply outside the reach of the thing that reaches everybody else, and something in you has known that about your situation for eleven years and had no vocabulary for it, so it came out as a mood.

So hear this said over you, stopped in the middle of a paragraph in the spring. What you have been feeling is a real distinction and Scripture draws it in a legal code, and eleven years of concluding you were in a mood was eleven years of not being handed the word. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives understanding, and He is under no obligation to hand a person the vocabulary on the first attempt.

Now let me be exact about what this does not license, because a precise reader will want the boundary drawn.

This is not a verdict on anybody.

You now have a category. A category is not evidence, and you are not in a position to run the assessment on another human being from the inside of your own eleven years, and neither am I from here. The word is for describing what you have been carrying, not for filing a finding about a man.

And nothing here tells you to say it. Not to him, not about him, not to anybody who knows him. If you never use the sentence out loud, you have not failed anything in this article. Having a word is not the same as being required to speak it, and a great many words are best kept for a long time before they are ever said.

What changes tonight is smaller and it is entirely inside you.

You can stop calling it a mood.

The written word draws the line, and it draws it about kings, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a person language for what they have been carrying, and He does it in His own time, which in your case was a Tuesday in the spring for reasons that had nothing to do with the situation.

There was a movement five hundred years ago whose founders were obsessed with this exact passage, and what they took from it was not a rule about scrolls. It was that everybody, including everybody at the top, stands under the same text, and that a structure which leaves anybody outside its reach has stopped being an arrangement of people and started being something else.

They spent generations building courts and appeals to keep that true. And they would have understood a man stopping in the middle of a paragraph.