The Person I Would Have Told Is Gone

Most of what gets written about not telling anybody assumes you are refusing to.

That is not your situation.

You had somebody. There was one person who knew the whole of it, or would have if you had said it, and they are not here. They died, or they moved to the other side of the country, or the friendship ended for reasons that had nothing to do with you.

And what you have now is not reluctance. It is an absence. You would tell somebody tonight if there were somebody, and there is not, and every article that tells you to just tell a friend lands on you as a description of a life you no longer have.

I want to write to that, because I think it is one of the loneliest positions in this whole subject and almost nobody addresses it.

No man cared for my soul

There is a line in the Psalms that says this out loud in a way people find shocking.

I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul. (Psalm 142:4, King James Version)

No man cared for my soul.

That is in the Bible. Not as something a person got corrected for saying, and not as a mistake in their thinking. It is written down as an accurate report of a situation, and the psalm is not rebuked for it.

And notice what he does with it. He does not talk himself out of it. He does not list the people who technically care about him. He says the true thing, and then, in the next verse, he says it upward: I cried unto thee, O LORD.

So the sequence is: name the absence accurately, then speak into it, and there is no step in between where he has to pretend the absence is not real.

You are not exaggerating your situation, and Psalm 142:4 has never once corrected a person for saying there is nobody. It is written as a plain report with no rebuke attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a true and terrible sentence stand while sitting beside somebody in it.

You have been told to tell a friend by people who do not know that the friend is gone. The word records the absence without softening it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the place where the person used to be.

The least wrong person

Now let me say something practical and slightly uncomfortable.

There is nobody who can take that person's place, and I am not going to suggest anybody could. Whoever you tell will be worse at it. They will not have the history. They will not already know the background. You will have to explain things that never needed explaining before, and that is a real loss and it is not solved by finding somebody else.

But the task tonight is not to replace them. The task is much smaller. It is to have one living person who knows one true thing.

So the question is not who could be what they were. The question is: who is the least wrong person available.

The neighbor. The person at work you have always liked. The cousin. The woman from church. Somebody who is nowhere near good enough, and who is present, and who is alive.

You were never looking for a replacement, and there has never once been a version of tonight that required one. Psalm 142:4 names the absence and then speaks anyway, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a person from nobody at all to one living name.

You are permitted to tell somebody who will do it badly, and their doing it badly has never once made the telling worthless. It is written that he named the emptiness and cried out from inside it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a message sent to somebody who is not the right person.

Text one new person

So here is the whole of what I am asking, and it is going to feel wrong.

You have a name in your phone tonight that is nowhere near good enough and is alive, and no second best person has ever once been worthless. Psalm 142:4 reports the emptiness without a word of rebuke and then speaks from inside it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in a conversation held at a fence.

Pick somebody who is not the person. Somebody current. Somebody nearby.

Send them: the house is bad and I am working on it.

Do not explain the history. Do not tell them about the person who is gone, unless it comes out on its own. Tonight is one fact given to one living human being.

Then put the phone down and clean nothing.

You are able to give one true thing to somebody who is here tonight, and it has never once required them to be the right person. Psalm 142:4 speaks from inside the absence rather than after it is filled, and the Spirit of God is present in a message sent to a name that would not have been on the list two years ago.