One Sentence At A Wedding

It was at table nine, between the speeches and the dancing, and it took about four seconds to say.

She has replayed it enough times to know exactly how long it took. She knows what she was holding. She knows the song that was on when she said it, and she cannot hear that song now without her whole chest going tight, so she skips it, and she has skipped it for five years.

They had been friends since they were nineteen. That is the sort of friendship that has its own language and its own shorthand and about a thousand small in jokes nobody else would find funny. And she said one sentence, one true, sharp, entirely unnecessary sentence, and her friend looked at her for a moment and then said something perfectly pleasant and went and got a drink.

Nothing dramatic happened after that. That is what makes it so difficult to explain to anybody. There was no row and no ultimatum. There was just a slow drift that both of them could have stopped and neither of them did, and now there is a birthday message once a year with a full stop at the end of it.

She has prayed about it. She wants that said. She has prayed the sensible prayers about her own heart and she has prayed the sentimental ones in the car, and she has prayed the honest ones where she admitted what she actually wanted, which was to go back to table nine and say nothing at all.

And last week a woman at work who is lovely and who knows almost none of this said: you know what, have you tried fasting about it?

She said she might. She has thought about it every day since. And what she heard underneath a genuinely kind suggestion was that after five years there was still one more thing she had not done, and that a sentence she said at a wedding might still be hers to unsay.

If you have a song you skip, come and sit down for a bit.

Nobody is marking your prayers about this

Let us deal with that in the first minute, because otherwise you will read the rest of this braced for a telling off.

You have not prayed this badly, and you are not being kept at arm's length while heaven waits for a better sentence. That is not a soft thing said to somebody with a sore memory. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been carrying five years of untidy car prayers into a place your own words were never going to reach on their own.

There is a thing that happens to a person who has hurt somebody they love. The love does not stop. It has nowhere to go, so it turns into a project, and prayer stops being a conversation and becomes a repair job you clock into every morning. Then somebody kind, who knows none of the history, adds one more task to the list, and you take it, because you would take anything.

What God does with the part of you that broke it

There is a line in the Psalms written by a man who had done genuine damage, and it does not say what people expect it to say.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Read the direction of travel. He is near. Not impressed, not waiting, not standing at a distance until the damage is repaired. Near.

David wrote that as a man with a real history, not as a man with a clean one. And the nearness in that verse is not a reward for a good week. It is what God is like when somebody is holding a broken thing.

You are already close to Him, right now, with the sentence still in your memory. I did not invent that to make a hard afternoon easier: it is what the psalm says out loud (Psalm 34:18), and it is His Spirit, not this paragraph, that makes it something you can actually rest on while the song is still unplayable.

So what is fasting, if it is not the thing that finally unsays a sentence?

The answer is smaller, and it is much better

Fasting is not a payment and it is not a lever and it is not the piece that has been missing. It is not news carried up to a God who had not been told. It is your body brought into a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and skips a song on a playlist, turning toward God with nothing at all in her hands.

There is no plan on this page. Not a length, not a kind, not a schedule, nothing to work up to and nothing to finish. A plan is precisely what turns this back into a transaction, and a transaction is what has been quietly exhausting you for five years.

And here is a thing that belongs in the open and not in a footnote. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a difficult relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one inch further from God because of what a doctor said. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once turned up in a smaller measure because of what a body can or cannot do.

And if today has more weight in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a way around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.