He Binds Up, He Does Not Ask Who Started It

There are three versions and she knows every one of them by heart. There is the forty second one, for a hairdresser: we moved, it didn't really work out, and then you flip it into a question about them fast or they keep going. There is the four minute one for a friend who has earned it, with the names taken out and the worst of it sanded off the edges. And there is the one that is actually true, which she has never said aloud to a living person, and which now, after six years of rehearsal in an empty car, comes out of her mouth sounding like a legal document drafted by somebody else.

That is the part nobody warns you about. Not the wound. The rehearsing. Say a sentence often enough with nobody in the room and it stops being a sentence and becomes furniture, and you learn the route around it in the dark.

So when the new woman at work asked her, kindly, over the sandwiches, whether she went anywhere on a Sunday, she heard her own voice say oh, I'm between things at the moment, and smiled, and everything stayed exactly where it was.

You have a version too. And you are so tired of it that being helped now comes with a toll you cannot pay: first you would have to say it, properly, from the beginning, out loud, to somebody's face, and watch what it does to their expression while you did.

Nobody takes a statement first

Read the verse before you read anything about it. Sit in the order the words come in.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

There is no clause in it about the account. No preliminary. No question about who moved first, who was right, what was said in the hallway afterward, or whether you had been oversensitive, which is the word you have been quietly agreeing with for six years. He heals the broken in heart. He binds up their wounds. That is the entire transaction and it has one active party in it.

Binding up is a physical act and it tells you something about the person doing it. A person who binds up a wound is kneeling. Their hands are already busy. They are not conducting an interview, because an interview would cost time and the wound is what is in front of them. Anybody who has ever actually helped a bleeding person knows that the story comes later, over tea, if at all.

You are being attended to already, and no version of the account was required to start it. Psalm 147:3 says it and stops there, with no clause after it, and His Spirit is at the work while you are still deciding whether you could stand to describe it.

Here is what this piece is not going to do. It is not going to try your case. Not for you and not against anybody, not the leader, not the room, not the people who stayed. A verdict is not what you came here for, and a verdict is not what would help. You have run that trial in your own head more times than any court would allow, and you have noticed that the wound is exactly where it was when you started.

You have His attention without the paperwork, and you had it before you ever got the words in order. The written word carries it and the Spirit carries you, and Psalm 147:3 is the whole of the small print.

What your place is actually attached to

Now the question underneath the tiredness, the one you have not asked out loud because of how it would sound. Am I still in?

Six years of not walking into a building has done a quiet piece of arithmetic on you. It has suggested, never in so many words, that your place among God's people was a thing that lived inside that room, and that when you stopped going through that door, you left it on the chair.

But look at who put you among His people in the first place. It was not that room. That room did not issue your standing, so it does not hold the pen on it. No congregation on earth has ever been the office where that record is kept, which is why what happened there could not touch it and did not.

You were put among God's people by God Himself, and that standing was never once held on that building's behalf. There is a line for this and it is Psalm 147:2, sitting one verse above the binding up, and the same Spirit who moved the man who wrote it is in the room with you.

That cuts both ways and it is meant to. It means nobody there can take it from you. It also means the ache did not come from losing your standing, because your standing never moved. The ache came from the wound, which is a different thing, and which is being seen to by somebody who does not need to hear the story first.

Those two have been braided together in you for six years and it is worth pulling them apart, because they need entirely different things. A lost standing would need restoring, which is a process, and a decision, and probably a room. A wound needs binding, which is a pair of hands and some time and no talking. Only one of those was ever actually your situation, and the other one has been costing you sleep on behalf of a problem that does not exist.

It is already yours, this belonging, and six years of silence did not spend a day of it. You were promised this in writing, and His Spirit is not renegotiating it. Psalm 147:3 sits inside a psalm about a God who counts the stars and names every one of them.