I Do Not Know What Words To Use

You are not refusing to tell anybody. You have been trying to write the message for about a year.

And every version is wrong.

If you say it plainly it sounds too big and you can see the alarm it would cause. If you soften it, it stops being true and they will not understand what you have actually said. If you explain the year that caused it, it becomes a long message about grief or illness that requires a serious reply, and you cannot ask that of somebody by text. If you make it light, it becomes a joke about your own house and you will have made it into a joke forever.

So there are four versions and all four are wrong, and the message does not get sent, and it has not been sent for a year, and the not sending has started to feel like a decision you made rather than a sentence you could not find.

That is the whole problem, and it is a smaller problem than it feels like, and I think I can solve it tonight.

A word fitly spoken

There is a line in Proverbs about the right words at the right moment.

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver. (Proverbs 25:11, King James Version)

A word fitly spoken.

The word behind fitly is about being well fitted, set properly in place, the way a stone is set into metalwork. It is a craft image. Somebody made that setting, carefully, so the thing would sit right.

Which tells you something worth having tonight: the right words are made. They are not felt for, and they do not arrive. They are constructed, and a person can be given one already made rather than having to build their own.

That is what I am going to do tonight. I am going to hand you the setting.

You are not bad with words, and Proverbs 25:11 has never once described the right sentence as something a person finds by feeling. It is written as a crafted thing, fitted and set, and the Holy Spirit is the one who provides what a person cannot construct while they are the one inside the situation.

You have been trying to write a sentence about your own life from inside it. The word calls a fit sentence a made thing, and the Spirit of God is the one who hands over something already built.

Why every version failed

Now let me show you what went wrong with your four versions, because there is a pattern and once you see it the problem dissolves.

Every one of your drafts tried to do two jobs at once.

Job one is to say the true state of the house. Job two is to manage what happens next: their reaction, their concern, whether they will offer to come, what you would say if they did.

You have been asking one sentence to do two jobs, and no sentence anywhere has ever once been able to be true and control the answer. Proverbs 25:11 sets one word fitly in one place and asks nothing else of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a second impossible task off a person's shoulders.

And a sentence cannot do both. The moment it starts managing the aftermath it stops being true, and the moment it is true it stops being able to control what happens after.

So we drop job two entirely. Not because the aftermath does not matter. Because it is not this sentence's work, and it never was, and trying to make one message carry both is why a year has gone by.

You were never unable to say it, and there has never once been a sentence capable of saying a true thing and controlling the response to it. Proverbs 25:11 sets one word fitly in one place and never asks it to do two jobs, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a second impossible task off a person's shoulders.

Here is the sentence. It is nine words and it has been used by a great many people.

The house is bad and I am working on it.

That is all of it. First clause: the true state. Second clause: nothing needs rescuing. There is no explanation, no year, no apology, no request, and no management of what happens next.

You are permitted to use words that are not your own, and borrowed words have never once made a true thing less true. It is written that the fit word is set like a stone in metal, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when somebody sends a sentence they did not have to write.

Send that exact sentence

So here is the whole of what I am asking, and I mean it exactly.

Pick one person. Send: the house is bad and I am working on it.

Do not improve it. Do not add a name at the front or a kind sign off at the end. Do not add sorry. Do not add I know this is weird. Every addition is job two coming back in.

Then put the phone down and clean nothing.

You are able to send nine words tonight, and sending them has never once required you to have found them yourself. Proverbs 25:11 honors a word set fitly in place, and the Spirit of God is present in a sentence somebody else made and you sent.