Say It Out Loud While It Is Still Warm

Dermot got the call in a supermarket parking lot at twenty past four on a Thursday and he sat there afterwards for eleven minutes with the engine off.

The job. After three years of it. Three years of a particular kind of Tuesday morning that anybody who has been out of work will recognize, and a particular way of saying "still looking" at family things, and the specific arithmetic of a man who has stopped telling his wife about the ones he did not get.

And it went. It actually went.

So he sat there. And what he did, in those eleven minutes, was plan.

He would tell Sinead first, obviously, but not on the phone, in person, when she got in, and he would not lead with it, he would let her get her coat off. Then his mother, who would want to know the money and the hours and whether it was permanent. Then Colm, who had put a word in and who would be pleased in the specific way that a man is pleased when the word he put in worked.

Then the group chat, and probably a quieter message to Deirdre, who had also been out for a long time and for whom this news would be a slightly complicated thing to receive, and he thought about how to word that one for a while.

Eleven minutes. He worked out an entire order of operations, and he was still sitting in the car when a woman with a cart gave him a look.

He said afterwards that he did not realize until about nine that night, standing at the sink with everything already told and the house gone quiet, that he had spent eleven minutes managing his good news like a piece of logistics, and had not once, at any point, said thank you to anybody who was not a human being.

He said it was not guilt. He wants that understood. It was more like finding out that you have been carrying something in one hand for three years and had two hands the whole time.

You do the same thing, probably. Something good happens and immediately it becomes a communications problem, and you are working out the order and the wording and who will take it how. And in the middle of all that management, the one conversation that would cost you nothing and take four seconds does not get had.

Fruit, Not Duty

There is a phrase at the end of Hebrews that people read as an instruction and that is actually a description of what a person is like.

"By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name."Hebrews 13:15

The fruit of our lips. Not the tax of our lips. Not the payment of our lips. Fruit is what a healthy thing produces because of what it is, and the whole image is agricultural and involuntary in the best sense.

An apple tree does not owe you apples. It makes them because of what is going on underneath it.

You are carrying something under the ground that produces this, and it does not have to be forced. Hebrews 13 puts thanksgiving in the register of fruit and never once in the register of obligation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line at the end of a long letter and lands it in a man in a parking lot with a phone in his hand.

And notice what it is offered by. By him therefore. The whole sentence is bracketed by Christ, which means the saying of it is not a performance you have to get right and is not a fee for the good thing that just happened.

You have been given a mouth and a reason and the two of them belong together. That is what the written word says about giving thanks every time it raises the subject, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a phrase like that arrive as gladness rather than as a job.

Nobody Here Is Auditing Who You Told

Now the part that has to be said carefully, because articles like this one usually go wrong at exactly this point.

Nothing about telling Sinead first was a failure. Nothing about the group chat was a failure. Dermot was right to think about how to word the message to Deirdre; that is what a decent man does.

This is not an article about a league table of who you should have told and in what order, and if you have finished a piece of writing about this subject feeling like you failed a test about your own good news, then somebody has taught you badly.

The point is not that people came first. The point is that God did not come at all, and the reason was not disloyalty, it was that it had never occurred to him that God would want to hear it.

That is the actual thing worth naming. Not a ranking. A relationship in which the other party is genuinely glad.

You have never once been an interruption when you brought Him something good. It is written that He rejoices over you with singing, which puts gladness on His side of the conversation before it is on yours, and His Spirit is the one who is already glad about a thing you have not mentioned yet.

And say the guard, because this is where a warm thing goes cold in one move. Nothing on this page is a rule. There is no order you have to observe, no first person you are obliged to tell, no wording that has to be right, and nothing routed to anybody anywhere. If the next good thing goes to your whole family before it goes to God, you are exactly as much His at the end of that evening, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from turning into an audit.