The Apology You Put In Front Of It

The band is still tuning behind the cake and nobody has touched the dessert forks yet.

Table nine. A jar candle with a wick that keeps drowning itself and coming back. Her name on a folded card with one letter too many in it, which she has not corrected, because it is a wedding and nobody cares and the bride looked happy walking in.

The man on her left has been kind all evening. He has talked about his knee, and about a dog he had in the nineties, and he has refilled her water without being asked twice. And then, in the gap while the plates go, he turns and says it lightly, the way people ask a thing they have no idea is a trapdoor.

So what are you, church wise?

And she hears her own voice start before she has decided anything at all.

Oh. Well. It is complicated. I mean, I used to be, but not, like, not now, I would not want to give you the wrong impression, I am not one of those people who, and honestly after everything I would not even know what to put, it is a long story and you do not want it at a wedding.

Ninety seconds of that. Maybe more. She can hear herself doing it while she is doing it, which is its own particular kind of misery, and the whole time, sitting underneath the noise and entirely available, are three words she believes with everything she has and could have said first.

The band comes in loud on the downbeat. The question dissolves the way questions do at weddings. He says sure, sure, kindly, and turns to see whether the cake is moving yet, and the moment closes over like water.

Later she is out in the lot with her shoes in her hand and the heat still coming up off the asphalt. She is not thinking about the man, who was lovely, or the question, which was fair. She is thinking about the order.

She apologized. Then she answered. The apology took ninety words and the answer took three, and only one of them was actually true.

The preface is not part of the answer

Somewhere along the way you learned to put a run up in front of the truth. It was not cowardice. It was manners, mostly, plus a few conversations that went badly, plus the sense that a short answer sounds like a thin one and a thin one invites a follow up nobody has the strength for at a wedding.

So the preface grew. It got long enough to protect you and long enough to bury the thing it was protecting.

Watch what Paul does with the preface in Romans 1:16. He does not build one. He picks it up and puts it down: I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth. That is written, and the same Spirit who set it down in a letter to Rome is sitting with you in a car in a parking lot with your shoes in your hand.

Notice the reason he gives. Not because embarrassment is bad manners. Because of what the thing actually is. You are holding the power of God, and power does not need to be introduced with an apology, and Scripture says so plainly rather than leaving it to my opinion, and His Spirit is what makes that true of you tonight and not just true in general.

"For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth."Romans 1:16, KJV

Here is what I am not saying, and I want to be exact, because the opposite error is just as expensive. A short answer is not a small faith, and it is not a finished one either. Nothing here is telling you that what you believe does not matter, or that the reading and the asking and the wrestling should stop. Keep every bit of that. Go deeper this year than you went last year.

The short answer is a door. It is not a ceiling. What it is, tonight, is enough to say out loud without a run up.

You have three words that are load bearing, and they were load bearing at that table under the noise while the preface was still going. That is not a consolation prize. His word puts the power in the gospel itself rather than in your ability to frame it, and the same Spirit who carried that sentence to Rome carries it to table nine.

And there is something the ninety words were quietly doing that we should name and stop. They were asking the man with the dog to go easy on you. He was never your judge. He asked a question over a jar candle while the plates were being cleared.

You were given a plain sentence to say, and it was promised to be power rather than performance, and it was His Spirit that put it in your mouth long before you learned to hedge it.