Something Was Said And I Am Still Holding It

It was eleven words and it took about three seconds to say.

And you have now heard it, by any reasonable estimate, somewhere between forty and sixty times, because you have been replaying it since about nine last night and you replayed it four times before you were properly awake this morning.

Nobody else in that room remembers it. That is the part that is almost funny. There is a very good chance the person who said it does not remember saying it, and would be genuinely surprised, and would not be able to reconstruct it if you asked them.

And it is sitting in the middle of your chest like something swallowed wrong.

Let me deal with the first thing, which is the embarrassment, because it is doing more damage than the sentence.

You have been telling yourself all morning that this is a ridiculous amount of room to give eleven words. That a reasonable woman would have let it go by now. That the fact that you have not is a sign of something small in you.

It is not. A sentence that lands well has a specific quality: it is aimed accurately. It found something already there and it named it, in front of people, in three seconds. Of course you are still holding it.

Be ye angry, and sin not

There is an instruction in Ephesians that people quote at each other for the second half and almost never for the first.

Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath. (Ephesians 4:26, King James Version)

Be ye angry. It is an imperative. Whatever else that verse is doing, it is not treating anger as a failure, because it opens by telling people to have it.

And then: and sin not. Two things in one line, which means they are separable. The anger and the wrongdoing are not the same substance, and the instruction assumes a person can hold the first without the second.

That alone should take a considerable weight off this morning, because you have been treating the presence of the feeling as the problem.

You are permitted to be angry and to not be sinning at the same time, and it is written into Ephesians 4:26 as two separate clauses in one sentence. The written word puts an imperative in front of the anger, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a feeling from a fault for somebody who has been fusing them since nine last night.

Now the second half, which is the one used as a stick.

You are inside a verse about not letting it settle rather than one about not having it, and Ephesians 4:26 says let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Scripture is describing what to do with it rather than forbidding it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman at half past seven who did let the sun go down and cannot undo that now.

Replaying is not processing

Now let me be exact about what the last twelve hours have been, because it feels like working on something and it is not.

Replaying is not the same as processing. It feels similar, and it uses the same equipment, and it produces nothing.

Here is the difference. Processing changes the material: you understand something new, or you reach a decision, or the thing becomes smaller. Replaying reproduces the material identically, forty times, and each reproduction wears a slightly deeper groove.

You have not been thinking about that sentence. You have been rehearsing it, which is a different activity, and after twelve hours the sentence is more available to you than it was at the time.

You have been rehearsing rather than resolving, and the written word tells a person what to do with anger rather than leaving it to circulate. Ephesians 4:26 puts a limit on how long it may sit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names an activity that a woman has been mistaking for work.

And here is why it will not stop on its own. The sentence is unanswered.

Every time it comes round, some part of you produces the reply you did not give, and then the reply is not delivered, and so the loop does not close. A loop with no exit runs indefinitely, and at about three in the afternoon you will still be composing.

You have been holding an unfinished exchange rather than an unforgiven one, and Scripture puts the anger and the not sinning side by side as two things that can coexist. Ephesians 4:26 does not ask a person to feel nothing, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in an unclosed loop.

Write it, and write the answer

So here is the assignment, and it has two halves and the second one is the one that works.

Write the sentence down word for word, and then write what you would have said.

The sentence first, exactly as it was said, in quotation marks if that helps. Getting it exact matters, because half the replaying is your head trying to be sure it has it right.

Then underneath, write the reply. The one you have been composing since nine last night. Write the good version, the one that arrived at about eleven and was better than anything you would have managed at the time.

You are able to finish an exchange on paper rather than in your head, and it has never once required the other person to hear one word of it. Ephesians 4:26 tells a person not to let it settle in overnight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman at a table finishing a conversation that ended badly.

And then leave the paper. Do not send it, do not memorize the reply for next year, and above all do not decide to say it at some future point, because a reply held for a future occasion is the loop running on a longer cycle.

The point is not to be right. The point is that the loop closes, and a loop closes when the reply exists somewhere outside your head.

Most people find it takes about four minutes and that the sentence is noticeably smaller on paper than it was in the air, which is worth knowing before you start.

You are closing a loop rather than winning an exchange, and the written word puts a boundary on how long wrath may sit rather than on whether it may exist. Ephesians 4:26 begins with be ye angry, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives a conversation that was finished on a piece of paper.