It Cost Him the One Thing He Actually Wanted

Forty seconds. He has timed it in his head more than once and it is about forty seconds.

He is not going to describe the sentence. Everybody who has done this has one and the shape is always the same: a true thing said in a way designed to land, and the design is the part that cannot be taken back, because a man cannot claim he did not know where it would go when the whole reason he chose it was that he did.

He apologized within the hour. He has apologized several times since.

It did not come back. That is the fact he has had four years to look at, and no amount of looking has changed it, and people who tell him it might are being kind and are not helping.

What he wants to say to somebody, and never has, is that he did not lose it to circumstance or to bad luck or to anybody else. He had exactly one thing he cared about more than the rest, and he took it out himself, in about the time it takes to boil a kettle.

A king said a sentence he could not take back

There is a scene in Samuel where a father says something at a table, and the relationship never recovers.

Then Saul's anger was kindled against Jonathan, and he said unto him, Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman, do not I know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own confusion, and unto the confusion of thy mother's nakedness? (1 Samuel 20:30, King James Version)

Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman.

He is talking to his own son, at a meal, in front of people. And the insult goes through the boy at the mother, which is a choice made by somebody who knew exactly where to aim.

The next verse has him throwing a spear at him.

And Jonathan leaves the table, and the text says he ate no meat that day, for he was grieved for his father had done him shame.

They never repair it. He dies on a hill beside the man years later, and the book never gives them a scene where it gets fixed.

You are not the first man to have taken out the thing he wanted most. 1 Samuel 20 records the sentence and the spear and never gives the two of them a repair scene, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old table land on somebody with four years behind him.

The instruction after a fall is a mending word

There is a sentence in Galatians about what happens to a man who is caught out, and the verb is from a trade.

Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. (Galatians 6:1)

Restore such an one.

The word is the one used for setting a bone and for mending a net. It is about a thing being put back into working order.

And what is described as being restored is the man rather than the situation. The verse does not promise the net gets the fish back that went through the hole.

You are the one the instruction says to put back into working order. Galatians 6 aims the mending at the person, and it is His Spirit who makes a trade word do something for a man who is not asking for the situation back.

God says something about years

There is a sentence in Joel that is unusual, because it is about time rather than about things.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten. (Joel 2:25)

The years.

He does not say the crops. He says the years, which is a strange thing to promise, because a year is the one thing that cannot be handed back.

Which is worth reading carefully by somebody who has been told that the thing might come back and knows that it will not. God is not described here as reversing a loss. He is described as doing something with a span of time that was eaten.

Whatever that means exactly, it is not the same as pretending nothing was lost, and it is not nothing either.

You are inside a promise about years rather than about getting the thing back. Joel 2 names time rather than property, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an odd old promise stop sounding like a consolation.

What God does not throw out

There is a line in Psalm 51, written by a man who had done something much worse than lose his temper, about what does not get discarded.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. (Psalm 51:17)

Thou wilt not despise.

Read the wording. He does not say God is impressed by it or that it earns anything back.

He says it does not get thrown out, which is the exact promise a man needs when what he has to bring is not a plan or a repair, but a fact he cannot alter and four years of looking at it.

You have something that does not get thrown out. Psalm 51 names what He will not despise, and it is His Spirit who makes an old sentence hold for a man with nothing to offer but the account.

And the sentence about all things is more careful than people think

There is a verse people say at each other in these situations, and it is worth reading exactly.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

Work together for good.

It does not say all things are good. It does not say the forty seconds were secretly fine, and anybody who uses it that way is misquoting it at somebody in pain.

It says something is being done with the material, and it says the material includes all of it, and it does not name a timescale.

You are not being told the thing was fine. Romans 8 says work together rather than are good, and it is the Spirit, named twelve verses earlier as making intercession, who is at work in that whole passage.