He Named His Son After the Thing He Could Not Do

The rehearsal begins on its own and that is the worst feature of it.

He does not decide to run it. He is doing something ordinary, driving, or waiting for a kettle, and it starts, and it is always the same scene, and he has been running it for about six years.

It is not even a long scene. It is about ninety seconds of something that happened, and he knows it word for word, and every time it runs he adds one small thing he should have said, so that the version he has now is considerably better than the one that occurred.

He has tried to stop. Stopping does not work, because the instruction to stop thinking about something is the one instruction the mind is structurally unable to follow, and every attempt is itself a rehearsal.

Joseph named his first son for exactly this and the name is usually mistranslated in people's heads.

The first name is about forgetting and it is not about amnesia

Here is the verse.

And Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh: For God, said he, hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house. (Genesis 41:51, King James Version)

Hath made me forget. And the first thing to say about that is that he plainly had not forgotten, because he goes on to describe it in detail, name his brothers, weep repeatedly, and hold entire conversations about it in later chapters.

The Hebrew word covers forgetting in the sense of a thing ceasing to have a hold rather than in the sense of an absence of memory. He remembers everything. What has changed is what it does to him.

That distinction is the whole article. Nobody in this situation is asking to lose the memory, and if they were offered it most would refuse. What they want is for it to stop starting on its own, which is a different request and a possible one.

You are able to keep the memory and lose the hold. Genesis 41:51 uses a word about a thing ceasing to grip rather than about amnesia, and it is the Spirit of truth, John 16:13, who guides into an accurate account rather than an erased one.

God is the subject of the sentence

The other half of that verse is who did it.

For God, said he, hath made me forget.

He does not say: I have got over it. He does not say: time has done its work. The subject of the verb is God, and the naming of a child is Joseph putting that on the record permanently in a way he will have to say out loud several times a day for the rest of his life.

That is worth noticing by anybody who has been trying to stop the rehearsal by effort. The effort is not the mechanism. Joseph is not commended for having managed something; he is describing something done to him and putting a name on his son about it.

You are not the mechanism, and the verb in that sentence has God as its subject. Genesis 41:51 says God hath made me forget, and it is by the Spirit, Titus 3:5, who is named as doing the renewing rather than a person achieving it.

And then the second son

There are two names, and almost everybody remembers the first and forgets there was a second, which is unfortunate, because the second is the method.

And the name of the second called he Ephraim: For God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction. (Genesis 41:52)

Fruitful in the land of my affliction.

Not: fruitful after leaving. Not: fruitful once it was resolved. In the land of it, which is the same place, and he was still in Egypt and his brothers were still out there and nothing had been settled with anybody.

So the pair of names is a sequence and it is the practical answer. The hold loosens, and then something grows in the same field.

And I would put it that way round rather than the other, because most people are waiting to be free of the thing before they start anything, and the second name says the growing happens in the land of the affliction rather than somewhere else.

You are able to be fruitful in the same field rather than after leaving it. Genesis 41:52 says fruitful in the land of my affliction, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, whose fruit is named as His rather than as a product of a resolved situation.

Paul says what to do with the running scene

The New Testament version of this is one clause and it is more practical than it looks.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before. (Philippians 3:13)

Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth.

Two participles in one sentence, and they are simultaneous rather than sequential. The forgetting is not something completed before the reaching starts; it happens by means of the reaching.

That is the answer to the impossibility of stopping. Nobody stops a rehearsal by attacking it. The scene ends when attention is genuinely occupied by something forward, and Paul puts both verbs in the same breath because in practice they are one motion.

And this one thing I do is worth having. He does not describe an inner state. He describes an activity.

You have been given a motion rather than an instruction to stop. Philippians 3:13 puts the forgetting and the reaching in one sentence as simultaneous participles, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 3:16, that the inner man is strengthened for it.

The trade Isaiah describes

There is a verse about this that is a list of exchanges, and the items are physical.

To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified. (Isaiah 61:3)

Beauty for ashes. It is a trade rather than a removal. The ashes go somewhere and something comes back.

And the outcome named at the end is agricultural again: trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, which is the same picture as Ephraim, something growing where a person is rather than a person being relocated.

The planting of the LORD. Not self-seeded. He is described as the one who did the planting, which puts the growing on the same side of the ledger as the forgetting in Genesis 41.

Nothing on this page asks anybody to contact anyone, or to raise anything with somebody it is not safe to raise it with, or to do any of it by a date. If what happened is still happening, or if the rehearsal has become something you cannot get out from under, say it out loud to a doctor, a counselor, a social worker, or a pastor you trust, and in the United States the 988 crisis line is answered by a real person at any hour.

You are in a trade rather than a removal, and He is named as the one planting. Isaiah 61:3 gives beauty for ashes and calls them the planting of the LORD, and it is the Spirit of the Lord GOD, named in Isaiah 61:1 as being upon Him, who does the appointing.

Why the sentence has to be out loud

The physical action on this page is a spoken sentence and there is a reason it cannot be an internal resolution.

The rehearsal is verbal. It runs as words, in a person's own voice, with the same phrasing every time, and it has had six years of repetitions to become smooth.

An internal decision does not compete with that, because it is made once and the rehearsal runs three hundred times a year. What competes with it is another set of words, said out loud, repeatedly, in the same voice, about the same person.

One sentence. Kind and true. Said aloud, which is the only version that occupies the same equipment the rehearsal is using.

You are able to occupy the same equipment the rehearsal runs on. Philippians 3:13 describes an activity rather than a state, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 3:16, that the strengthening happens in the inner man rather than by a resolution.