Conversations That Never Happen

She gets in the car at twenty past eight and by the roundabout she is three sentences into it, and she has not decided to be.

It is the same conversation most weeks, and it is with a person she will see on Thursday, and in it she says the thing she has been meaning to say, and the other person answers, and she has an answer for that answer, and by the time she is at the second set of lights she has been through four versions of it.

She plays both sides. That is what makes it exhausting rather than merely repetitive. She writes the other person's lines too, and she gives them the worst ones, and then she has to defend against those, and the whole thing runs on a loop that has no ending because no ending is available.

On Thursday she will see the person and be perfectly warm and none of it will come up.

It has been about eight months. Different subject sometimes, same shape always. She does it in the shower and on the walk back from the school and at four in the morning if she wakes, and there is a low hum of tension in her chest most days that she has stopped attributing to anything because it has no obvious cause.

Nobody knows. There is no way to describe it that does not sound trivial.

That is you, and you have not had one of these conversations in real life all year.

This is not a faith problem

Let me say that plainly, because it is what may be sitting on you.

If you have been anywhere near religious talk about the mind, you may have collected the idea that a person with real peace would not be doing this, and that the loop is therefore evidence about your relationship with God. This rests on Scripture in Isaiah 26:3, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

It is not. It never has been.

A mind that rehearses is doing something minds do, and it is doing it for a reason that made sense at some point: rehearsing is how a person prepares, and preparation is a genuine good, and what has happened is that a useful function has got stuck in the on position. Scripture nowhere treats that as a spiritual failing, and the psalms are full of people whose thoughts would not leave them alone.

You are not further from God on that roundabout. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it puts no condition of a quiet mind in front of it anywhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that near enough to lean on at twenty past eight in the morning.

And if this has taken over more of your week than you can carry, people work with exactly this and are good at it. Going to them is not a lesser road than prayer, and it never was.

The verse is about where a mind is pointed

There is a line in Isaiah that gets quoted as a promise of calm and is actually a description of a mechanism.

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.Isaiah 26:3

Stayed is the word. It is a leaning word, a resting-the-weight-of-something word. It is not about how much you are thinking; it is about what your thinking is leaning on. Scripture already said it in Isaiah 26:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

And keep is a guarding word. Somebody is doing the keeping and it is not the person being kept.

Which matters here, because you have been trying to reach peace by finishing the loop. If I can just get to a version where I have the last word, it will stop. And it never stops, because a conversation with a person who is not in the car has no ending available, and you have been trying to win an argument with somebody who is not there.

You are not required to finish it in order to be kept. Scripture says thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, Isaiah 26:3, and the keeping is His work and the staying is a direction rather than a volume, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the keeping while a mind is still busy.

What the rehearsing is actually for

Here is the mechanism, and naming it will not switch it off but it will stop it spreading.

You are not preparing. You would say so yourself; on Thursday none of it comes up, and it never has. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Isaiah 26:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

You are trying to make a situation safe by controlling it in advance. If you have anticipated every line she might say, then nothing can arrive that you have not already met, and some part of you has decided that being unprepared is the actual danger. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Isaiah 26:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

But you cannot pre-live a conversation. You can only pay for it in advance, repeatedly, and you have now paid for this one about forty times and had it none. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Isaiah 26:3, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

And there is a second cost, quieter. You have been writing the other person's lines for eight months, and you have been giving them the worst ones, and a version of that person now exists in your head who is more hostile than the real one has ever been. On Thursday you will be warm to the actual woman while carrying eight months of what the imaginary one said.

You are not obliged to pre-live anything. Scripture says take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself, Matthew 6:34, and it reads as a release rather than a scolding, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a mind put down a rehearsal it was never asked to run.

Two small things

Not a technique for stopping, because you cannot stop a mind by deciding to and I am not going to ask you to try.

The first. When you notice you are in it, say one sentence out loud in the car. Not a prayer with a shape, just: I am doing it again, and I am handing this to You. Out loud, because out loud is different from thought, and because a rehearsal that is interrupted by an actual voice loses some of its grip. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Isaiah 26:3, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

The second. Decide whether the real conversation needs to happen.

That is the question underneath all of this and you have never asked it directly. Either there is a thing you genuinely need to say to that person, in which case eight months of rehearsal has been a substitute for four minutes of courage, or there is not, in which case your mind has been preparing for an event you have already decided will never occur. Scripture stands under that in Isaiah 26:3, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

Both answers are usable. Neither is available while you are still in the loop.

You are welcome to bring the actual question rather than the rehearsal. Scripture says in every thing by prayer and supplication let your requests be made known unto God, Philippians 4:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a person to ask the real question instead of running the argument again.