A Language You Do Not Speak

He went because a colleague invited him and he could not think of a reason to say no that would not sound like a reason.

It was a small hall attached to a building he had walked past for six years without once wondering what it was. Plastic chairs. A lot of children. Food along one wall under cling film, which he thought was a good sign.

And the singing was not in English.

He had known that going in, roughly, and had assumed it would mean forty minutes of standing politely and looking at the back of somebody's head.

There was one part, near the end, where an older woman started something on her own and the rest of the room came in underneath her, and it was not a performance in any way at all, and it went on for a while.

He did not understand one word of it. Not one. He could not have told you if it was praise or lament or a list of names.

And it took him apart.

He put his hand over his mouth, which he has never done in his life, and he stood there in a plastic chair row in a hall he had walked past for six years and could not stop it.

Afterwards there was food and a lot of noise and somebody's aunt gave him a plate he had not asked for, and he was fine, and he drove home fine.

And at some point on the ring road it arrived: I did not understand any of that.

Which he has been unable to leave alone since. He is a careful man. He reads things twice. His whole working life is built on knowing exactly what a sentence says before he signs anything, and something got all the way into him without going through the part of him that checks.

Something in you answered without the sentence

Let me put down a marker first, because it matters and it is easy to skip.

Understanding is not the enemy here. Being a man who reads things twice has kept you honest and has probably kept other people out of trouble, and Scripture is a book that expects to be read carefully and rewards it. Nothing in this is a case for feeling over knowing. That trade is a bad trade and this site will never offer it to you.

But hear this, and take it as settled rather than as consolation: something in you answered. You are not a man whose guard came down in a warm room. That is not my read on your evening, it is what stands written in the forty-second Psalm, where a man in a hard season says deep calls to deep at the roar of the waterfalls, and the same Holy Spirit who put that line in the book was in a small hall with plastic chairs and cling film on a Tuesday.

Look at what the psalmist reaches for when he has run out of ordinary description.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.Psalm 42:7

He does not say mind calls to mind. He is a literate man writing a careful poem, and at the point of greatest pressure he says there is a deep in God and a deep in him and the two of them are in conversation, and the noise around it is water, not sentences.

So there is a level at which you are addressed that does not run through your comprehension. That is not the beginner's level and it is not the substitute for the real thing. It is named in Scripture, by a man who could clearly write, as what happens when everything else has been exhausted.

And this is yours right now, and not once you have found out what the words meant: what reached you in that hall was not less real for being untranslated. The word says deep calls to deep, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the calling, and He has never once been held up at a language barrier.

Here is the second thing, and it is the one that will settle you.

You keep reaching for the translation because you think the meaning lives in it. But you already know that is not quite how it works, because you have been at a graveside where somebody said nothing and it meant more than the address did, and you have had a phone call where a voice you know said your name and you knew everything from the two syllables before a word of content arrived.

Meaning travels in more than the sentence. You have known that all your life in ordinary things and have not let it be true about God. The written word says the Spirit searches even the deep things of God, and the Spirit is not a translator standing outside the room waiting to be handed a text.

You have been given a deep, and it recognized the deep in Him. The written word is explicit that the Spirit intercedes with groanings that words will not carry, and the Spirit was not waiting on your comprehension before He counted the conversation as having taken place.