I Have Become A Translator

He noticed it in a doorway and it took him about a second and a half to change over.

Wednesday evening, one room. Thursday morning, the other. And in the corridor between the car and the door on Thursday he felt himself do it: the vocabulary swapping out, the reference points going away and being replaced, the shape of what is safe to say sliding into a different shape.

A second and a half. He has been doing it for nine years and it is completely automatic now, and that is what stopped him in the corridor.

Because he is fluent. That is the trouble. He is so good at it that neither room has any idea it is happening, and both of them think they know him, and both of them are partly right, and neither of them has ever met the man standing in the corridor.

He said to himself, standing there with his hand on a door: I am not two people. I am the interpreter for two people who are not me.

And that is a lonelier thing than being two people, and he could not have explained why until later.

Two people at least both exist. An interpreter is a function. An interpreter is the thing in the middle that does not get a chair.

You know that corridor.

Maybe you switch words. Maybe you switch which stories you tell, or which parts of the year you mention, or how you refer to God when you are being careful. Maybe you have a set of subjects you keep for each room and you have never once written the lists down because you already know them by heart.

And there is no villain in either room. That is the hardest part to say and the most important. The people on both sides of that door are good, and they have never once told you to hide anything, and the translating is something you started doing yourself because it was easier than the alternative, and because you were tired.

The one who was there before the sentence

Here is a psalm that reads like it was written by somebody who had been living in a corridor.

Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.Psalm 139:2-4

Read the last line slowly. There is not a word in my tongue, but Thou knowest it altogether.

Not: You understand me when I explain. Not: You get the gist. He knows the word before it is a word, which means the whole apparatus you use in a doorway, the selecting and the adjusting and the arranging, is doing nothing at all in this direction.

There is nothing to prepare. There is no version to choose.

You are known without translation, and the second and a half in the corridor buys you nothing where He is concerned. That is what the psalm says outright, that He understands the thought afar off and knows the word before the tongue forms it (Psalm 139:2-4), and it is the Holy Spirit who searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:10), which is the same faculty pointed at the same reality.

And notice the tone of the psalm. It is not a warning. It is not a man being told he is under surveillance. The whole thing ends with search me and know me, which is a man asking for more of it, not less.

That is what being known feels like when it is safe.

Interpreters get tired in a particular way

Now the practical bit, because the tiredness you carry has a specific shape and naming it helps.

Interpreting is not hard because of the words. It is hard because you can never stop attending. A person speaking their own language can go on autopilot for whole minutes at a time. An interpreter cannot, ever, because the next sentence might be the one that does not go across.

So you have been running at a level of vigilance, for nine years, in rooms that everybody else finds restful.

You have been working in the places other people relax in, and the tiredness is real rather than a failure of your character. Scripture says come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28), and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Comforter, which in the older sense is the one who comes alongside, and an interpreter who has somebody standing alongside them is doing a different job than one who is standing there alone.

Nothing here is telling you what to do about the two rooms

I want to be very clear about this, because a page like this could very easily hand you a decision, and it is not going to.

Nothing on this site knows your life. It does not know who is in those rooms, what it would cost to stop switching, what your family would do, or what you owe to whom. It has no business telling you to leave anywhere, to stop attending anywhere, to come out with anything, or to have a conversation you have not chosen to have.

You have not been given an instruction here, and no version of this asks you to do anything to either room. The word says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind (Romans 14:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who does that persuading in a person, over time, in private, which is why nobody gets to do it for you from a page on the internet.

What is being handed to you is a third room. Not one of the two. A third one, where nothing has to be selected, and where you have already been fully known for years without noticing.