They Say They Have Told Me Before

He is not unkind about it. Let us start there, because it matters and because it is true.

He does not sigh. He does not roll his eyes. What he does is answer the question and put a small sentence in front of it, and the sentence is, I told you this before.

He is not wrong. He probably did.

But something has been happening in you since about February, and it has nothing to do with him.

You have started counting. Not on purpose and not on paper. But you know roughly how many times he has said it this year, and you notice now when he says it, and there is a running number in your head that was not there two years ago.

And what you are counting is your own forgetting.

That is the thing I want to look at, because a woman keeping a private tally of her own failures is carrying something far heavier than any question she has ever asked, and nobody in that family has any idea it is happening.

I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance

There is a verse where a man explains why he keeps repeating himself to people who already know, and his reason is the surprising part.

Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth. (2 Peter 1:12, King James Version)

Read what he says about his audience. Though ye know them. And be established.

These are not slow people. They know it. They are settled in it. And he says he intends to keep telling them anyway, always, and to stop would be negligence.

You are in the company of people Scripture calls established and still tells again, and knowing a thing has never once meant that a person is finished being told it. 2 Peter 1:12 says I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary for a woman who has been ashamed of asking twice.

Notice where the duty sits in that sentence. It sits on the teller. He is the one who would be negligent. Not the hearers, for needing it.

That is a complete reversal of how most families arrange this, and it is in the text, and it has been there the whole time.

You have never once been the one carrying the duty in that arrangement, and Scripture has never put the burden of the repeating onto the person who needed it. The Holy Spirit is the one who puts a weight back where it actually belongs, and it is written that the negligence would have been in the not telling.

And there is the word always, which is not a small word. Always in remembrance. Not twice. Not until they have got it.

The repeating is described as permanent and ordinary, and nobody in that verse is embarrassed about it.

You were never on a schedule that runs out, and no number of tellings has ever once been the number at which a person stops being worth telling. The Spirit of God is the one who removes the count from something that was never being counted, and Scripture uses the word always without any qualification on it.

What the counting is doing

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not stop a tally.

Consider what actually gets counted and what does not. The times he said I told you before: counted. The times something went in and stayed: not counted. The things learned this year without anybody's help: not counted.

That is not a record. A record has both columns. What you have is one column, kept faithfully, and the other one has never been opened.

You are keeping half a ledger and reading it as the whole account, and one column has never once been an honest record of anything. The Spirit of God is the one who opens the column a person has never looked at, and 2 Peter 1:12 puts the repeating on the teller rather than on the hearer.

And here is the second thing, which is about him. That sentence he says is almost certainly not a judgment. It is a person locating himself in a conversation, working out whether to start at the beginning or the middle.

He says it to his colleagues. He says it to his wife. He has no idea it lands anywhere in particular, because nobody ever told him it does.

You have been reading a locating sentence as a verdict, and a phrase a man uses with everybody has never once been aimed at anybody. The written word puts the always in the mouth of the one doing the telling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a mother from misreading a son who loves her.

Count the other thing

Now the small thing, and it is a piece of arithmetic rather than a conversation.

I am not going to suggest you tell him how the sentence lands. That may be a good conversation to have one day, and it is a much bigger thing than this, and it is not what is needed first.

What is needed first is the other column.

You are able to open a column that has never once been opened, and counting what has gone right has never been dishonest bookkeeping for anybody. 2 Peter 1:12 says though ye know them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman starts counting the other thing.

So say out loud one thing you have learned this year. Out loud, in the room, on your own.

It does not have to be about a screen. It can be a name, a route, a recipe, the way something works in the town now, anything at all that a person did not know in January and knows in September.

And say it as a fact rather than as an argument. Not to prove anything to anybody. Only to put one entry in a column that has been empty for two years. Nobody ever told her that column existed, and a gap in the teaching is not a gap in a mind.

You are entering one true thing in a book that has only ever recorded losses, and one sentence said out loud has never once been vanity in anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who balances an account a person has been keeping badly against themselves, and it is written that even the established are told again.