I Have Told Everybody I Am Fine

Before anything else, the sentence that opens every page on this site. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing here is treatment, and nothing on this page ever stands in for a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. This page has exactly one purpose, which is to get somebody to make a phone call. If that somebody is you, make it before you finish reading.

Now. How many times have you said it this week?

I am fine. Honestly, I am fine. It is nothing. It comes and goes. It is worse when I am tired. I am fine.

You have said it to your wife. You have said it to your brother. You said it to somebody at work who asked a completely ordinary question and got a completely rehearsed answer.

And here is what has actually happened, which nobody warns a man about. The saying has become the problem. Going now would not only mean facing whatever the thing is. It would mean walking back a year of sentences, in front of people who took your word for it. And somewhere in the last few months, that second job got heavier than the first one.

Covering has a cost and the book names it

There is a proverb that is usually read as being about sin, and the mechanism in it is about any covered thing, and it describes exactly the ground this page stands on.

He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. (Proverbs 28:13, King James Version)

The word covereth is the one to sit with. Covering is work. It is not passive and it is not free. A covered thing has to be maintained, watched, remembered, kept consistent in front of different people.

And the proverb says the covering is what stops a man getting anywhere. Not the thing underneath. The covering.

You are carrying two loads and only one of them is the real one, and the second one has never once been required of you. Proverbs 28:13 puts the not prospering on the covering rather than on the thing covered, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man count what the maintenance has been costing him.

I want to be careful, because this is not a proverb about a body and I am not turning it into one. There is nothing sinful about being unwell. What is being described here is what happens to a person who is keeping something from everybody, and that is the shape of your year.

You have been maintaining a story, and no man has ever once had the energy to do that and be tired at the same time. The Spirit of God is the one who lets somebody stop keeping track of what they have said to whom, and it is written that mercy waits on the side of the saying rather than the side of the covering.

Nobody is keeping the tally you think they are

Let me say the thing that kept me from going, one year, because I think it is the same one.

I was not afraid of the appointment. I was afraid of the conversation with my wife in which I admitted that the thing I had been calling nothing since March was something I had been quietly worried about since March.

That conversation, in my head, was going to be a reckoning. It was going to be about all the times I had looked her in the face and said it was fine.

It was not a reckoning. It took about ninety seconds and she said: I know. I have known since the spring.

You are surrounded by people who worked it out a long time ago, and the covering has never once been as good as it felt from the inside. Proverbs 28:13 describes a covering that does not deliver what it promises, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends a performance nobody was buying.

That is nearly always how it goes. The household is not waiting to be shocked. The household is waiting to be allowed to help.

You were never fooling anybody in that house, and the truth has never once been the thing that would break it. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a ninety second conversation at a kitchen table, and what is written puts mercy on the far side of a plain sentence.

The plain routing, which is the whole reason for this page

Here is the part of this article that is not comfort, and on this page it is the entire point rather than a section of it.

If something is happening right now and it frightens you, that is 911, and it happens before you finish this paragraph. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And the thing you have been covering since last winter goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, by telephone, in your own words, without the version you have been giving people.

You are allowed to make that call without knowing what to call it, and nobody has ever once needed a name for it first. Proverbs 28:13 has a man say the thing and find mercy rather than say the thing and find a verdict, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets somebody as far as the phone with an unfinished sentence.

I am not going to guess at what it is, and I am not going to tell you what they are likely to say. I am not able to do either and it would be wrong of me to try. What I am telling you is that going is the strong move and it always was.

You have one call in front of you that ends the maintenance, and the passage has never once asked a man to arrive with his story sorted out. The Spirit of God is the one who steadies a person through the first sentence of a hard phone call, and what is written makes the confessing the thing that changes the direction of it.