The One Thing I Keep Privately

There is one thing he does on his own and he has never told anybody in either of his two rooms, and it takes about four minutes, and he has done it for nineteen years.

This page is not going to say what it is. It does not matter and it is not the point, and the moment a thing like that is named somebody starts working out whether it ought to be kept, and that argument has nothing to do with what is happening to him.

It is small. It is his. It came from his family. It costs nobody anything.

And for the first ten years or so he thought of himself, when he thought about it at all, as a man who keeps something.

He noticed the change about four years ago and he could not tell you what caused it.

Somebody nearly walked in. That is all. A door went, further off, and he did something with his hands that he has been thinking about ever since, which is that he moved.

Not slowly. Not the way you move when you are doing something ordinary and somebody comes in. He got it out of the way, fast, the way a person deals with something they do not want seen.

And afterward he sat there and thought: when did I start hiding this?

Because he has not been hiding it. Nobody has forbidden it, nobody has ever asked him about it, and if he told either of his rooms tomorrow the likeliest outcome by a long way is that somebody would find it interesting and then everyone would talk about something else.

There is no threat. And his hands moved anyway, which means something in him has reclassified the whole thing, quietly, over about four years, from a thing he keeps to a thing he conceals.

You know that door.

Maybe you have one too. A practice, a word, a small observance, a habit from where you are from. Maybe nobody has any idea and there is no reason on earth they would mind, and you have begun to feel the way people feel about things that are hidden.

There is no villain in this. Nobody made you furtive. It is what happens to a thing that lives entirely on its own for long enough: it acquires a quality it was never given, and the quality is shame, and it arrives without an author.

The secret place is a workshop

Here is the middle of the psalm about being known, and the word secret is used in a way most people never notice.

My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.Psalm 139:15

Made in secret.

Read what happens there. Not concealment. Not something being kept out of sight. Making. It is where the work was done, and the psalm treats secret as the location of a craftsman rather than as a place things go to be unseen.

And the phrase after it is stronger: curiously wrought, which is an old way of saying skilfully worked, with attention, by hand.

So the hidden place in that psalm is not a cupboard. It is a workshop, and He is in it, and what comes out of it is the person.

You are seen in the secret place, and privacy was never the same thing as shame. That is what Psalm 139:15 does by making the unseen place the site of the work (Psalm 139:15), and it is the Holy Spirit who searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:10), which means the one place where your four minutes have always been visible is the one where they were never a problem.

Two different things wearing one word

Here is the distinction that has gone missing in you, and it is worth having plainly.

Privacy is a thing you choose. It is not everybody's business, you have not lied about it, and there is no obligation on any person to narrate the whole of themselves to a room.

Concealment is a thing you are managing. It has a fear attached and it costs you something every time a door goes.

They look identical from the outside. From the inside there is a very clear difference and you have been on the wrong side of it for about four years without ever crossing over deliberately.

You have not been deceiving anybody, and there is nothing here that needs confessing. Scripture says he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God (John 3:21), and read what the light shows, which is that the deeds were wrought in God, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that showing without a person having to prove anything to a room first.

And nothing here tells you to bring it out

Let me be as plain as I can, because this is the one paragraph that matters most on this page.

Nothing here tells you to mention it to anybody. Nothing here tells you to keep it going, either, or that it should be dropped, or that any community ought to hold it or not hold it. This site does not rule on that, in any direction, and it never will.

If you told them, that would be yours to choose. If you never do, that is a complete life and nothing is missing from it.

You are not being handed a disclosure to make. 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 years, which is why nobody outside your life gets a vote on four minutes.

The only thing being suggested is that you take the shame out and leave everything else exactly as it is.