The Number You Never Said Out Loud

Priya has told her husband about the miscarriage, the year she nearly left her job, and the thing her father said to her when she was eleven.

She has never told him the number.

That is not because he would react badly. He would not. He is a kind man and she knows exactly what he would say, which is something reasonable and slightly amused, and it would probably help.

She has simply never said it, and when she noticed that, one morning at a kitchen table, she sat there with her tea going cold and tried to work out why.

Because it is not shame, exactly. There is nothing shameful in it. It is not a huge figure and it is not a ridiculous one and nobody hearing it would think less of her.

It is not secrecy either. She is not hiding it. If he asked her outright she would tell him.

What she landed on, eventually, was stranger and truer than either of those, and it is the reason this article exists.

She has never said it out loud because saying it out loud would make it a number.

At the moment it is not a number. At the moment it is a feeling with a number in it, and the feeling is doing most of the work, and a feeling cannot be examined the way a figure can. As long as it lives only in her head it is allowed to be both precise and vague at once, which is a very useful combination if you would rather not look at something.

Say it out loud in a kitchen to a kind man and it becomes an amount, and an amount can be considered, and considered is exactly what it has never been.

You have your own version. There is a figure in you, and you know roughly what it is, and there is a very good chance that no other living person has ever heard it, including people who know your worst week.

Nobody is calling you secretive. You are probably an open person.

It has just stayed unspoken for a long time, and unspoken has been doing something for you.

The only prayer in Scripture that asks for a middle

There is a prayer in Proverbs that nobody prays and that is remarkable for being the only one of its kind.

Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me.Proverbs 30:8

He asks for neither.

That is genuinely unusual, and it is worth stopping on, because both errors are in that verse and both are named as dangers. He does not say wealth is the danger and poverty is the safe place, which is what a certain kind of preaching would have you believe. And he does not say the opposite either, which is what a different and equally confident kind would.

He asks for enough, and then he says why in the next verse: he does not want to be full and forget God, and he does not want to be desperate and disgrace Him. Two ditches, one road.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are not standing in either ditch by having a figure. That is not my reassurance: the written word treats the amount as a matter of prayer rather than a matter of guilt, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman at a kitchen table with her tea going cold.

And you already have what that prayer asks for. Not once the figure arrives: the word says the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, and it is not a promise about a balance, it is a statement about a shepherd, and the Spirit is the one who makes it something a person can actually stand on instead of admire.

Nobody is asking you to tell anybody

I want to be very plain, because this is where a message like this would tell you to go and have a conversation you did not agree to, and I am not going to do that.

Nobody here is telling you to say it to your husband, your friend, or anybody else. That is your business entirely, and there may be sensible reasons not to that I know nothing about.

Nobody is telling you what the figure ought to be, in either direction. I do not know your household or your year, and naming somebody else's number from a page would be exactly the kind of meddling this site refuses.

And nobody is telling you that having a figure is a fault. Proverbs 30 puts it in a prayer, which is the opposite of putting it in a confession.

The only thing being asked of you today is that it stops being a feeling and becomes a number, and that can happen entirely alone, in a kitchen, with a pen, and nobody ever needs to hear it.

And you are safe to look at it. Not once you have decided what to do about it: the word says perfect love casts out fear, and the Holy Spirit is entirely able to make an ordinary kitchen a place where a woman can write a true thing down without bracing.

And you have not been carrying it alone. That is the part that changes the temperature. He knows the thoughts He thinks toward you, says the written word, and the Spirit searches all things, so the figure that no other living person has heard has never once been unheard.