The Name I Still Flinch At

It came up at a farm sale, in the middle of a sentence about somebody else entirely, and Dwayne's whole body did something.

Nothing anybody saw. That is the thing. He carried on nodding. He made the right noise. The man talking had no idea and never will, and it was not about Dwayne at all, and he was gone from that name in about four words.

But something went through Dwayne's chest like cold water and it took him the rest of the afternoon to get level.

It was nineteen years ago. It was dealt with. And by dealt with he means properly: he owned his part, which was real and which was not the largest part but was not nothing either. He said so, out loud, to the two people who needed to hear it. There was a period of about three years that were difficult and then there was not.

He does not want anything from that man. He is not waiting for an apology and he has genuinely stopped constructing the conversation where he says the thing he never said.

And he still flinches at the name.

That is what bothers him now. Not the history. The flinch. Because the flinch feels like evidence, and the evidence appears to say that nineteen years and a great deal of prayer and two honest conversations did not actually do anything, or the name would not still be able to reach in and take an afternoon.

He is fifty-seven. He has told nobody about this, because how do you say it. A man said a name at a farm sale and I had to sit in the truck for a bit.

You may know that flinch.

Maybe it is a name. Maybe it is a road, or a make of car, or a particular month, or a song that comes on in a shop. And your body knows something you thought you had finished with.

What the flinch is not

Let me say this first because it is the thing you have been quietly afraid of.

The flinch is not evidence that the burial did not take.

I want to be careful and not just reassuring, so let me say what it is instead. It is a body doing what a body does. A thing happened, your system recorded it, and it kept the shortcut, and shortcuts do not get deleted when the matter is settled. That is true of everybody who has ever lived through anything, and it is not a spiritual measurement.

And I am not going to tell you to stop feeling it, or to rebuke it, or to be embarrassed about needing to sit in a truck for ten minutes. Sitting in the truck is not a relapse. It is a fifty-seven year old man letting his own body finish a reaction it started.

What I am going to question is what you have been reading off it.

Where the life is kept

There is a sentence in Colossians, in a passage about having died and been raised, and it puts your life somewhere very specific.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

Hid. Put somewhere. Deposited.

Not: your life is a thing you are maintaining and must protect from anything that could disturb it. It is described as an object that has been placed somewhere secure by somebody else, and the location given is two removes deep, with Christ, in God.

Which means the thing that got shaken at that farm sale was your afternoon, and your chest, and your nervous system, all of which are real.

It was not your life. Your life was not at the sale.

And what your body did at that sale did not reach the place your life is kept. The written word puts it hid with Christ in God, at two removes and by somebody else's action, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man sitting in a truck getting level.

And the flinch is not a report on whether anything was finished. The word says he hath made peace through the blood of his cross, in the completed tense, and the Spirit is the one who makes finished mean finished regardless of what a name does to a chest.

Nineteen years is not a failure to recover

Now let me say the other thing, because I think you have been running a timetable that nobody gave you.

Somewhere in you is an idea that nineteen years should have been enough to make a name inert, and that it not being inert means either the prayer did not work or you did not do the forgiving properly.

Neither of those follows.

The two honest conversations happened. The three difficult years happened. You stopped constructing the speech, and stopping that is the real marker and it is a rare one. All of that is what dealing with a thing looks like.

The nervous system was simply not consulted about any of it, and it has never been quick.

And you are not required to be untouchable for it to have been settled. The word says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and the Spirit is the one who makes that mercy rather than a low opinion of a man in a truck.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to somebody who has been reading his own body as testimony against himself.