The Thoughts You Have Never Said to Anybody

There is a difference between a secret and a thought that has never been said.

A secret is something a person is keeping. It has a shape and it has a decision behind it, and the person carrying it knows exactly what it is and could produce it if they chose to.

This is different. This is the ordinary, continuous, unremarkable interior of somebody's actual mind, which has never been said out loud to any human being, not because it is shameful but because there has never been an occasion, and after a certain number of years there stops being a language for it even inside the person's own head.

He could not tell you what he thinks. Not because he will not. Because it has never been in words, and things that have never been in words are not available in the way a person assumes their own thoughts are.

Psalm 139 makes a claim about that exact material.

The claim is about words before they exist

Here is the verse, and the tense is doing everything.

For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether. (Psalm 139:4, King James Version)

There is not a word in my tongue. The image is of something not yet said. It is on the tongue, which is the position immediately before speech, and it may never get past there.

Thou knowest it altogether. Completely, and in the present tense, before it exists as sound.

Which means the claim is not about God overhearing things. Overhearing requires speech. This is a claim about the material before it has become anything, and that is the exact material this article is about.

You are known in the part that has never become words. Psalm 139:4 puts it before the word leaves the tongue, and it is the Spirit who searches all things, 1 Corinthians 2:10, including what has never been formed into a sentence.

Understandest is a different verb from knowest

Two verses earlier there is a second claim and the verb is chosen carefully.

Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. (Psalm 139:2)

Knowest about the actions. Understandest about the thought.

Those are not the same word and the difference is the whole comfort. Knowing something is having the information. Understanding it is knowing what it means, which requires context, history, and enough familiarity to weigh it.

That distinction matters enormously to somebody whose interior has never been said. The reason it has never been said is usually not that nobody would hear it. It is that saying it would require twenty minutes of context first, and there is no occasion in a life that contains twenty minutes of context.

Afar off is often read as a claim about distance and it is more likely a claim about time: He understands it before it arrives, which means the context is already held.

You are understood rather than only observed, and the context is already held. Psalm 139:2 uses understandest for the thought and knowest for the actions, and it is the Spirit who searches the deep things of God, 1 Corinthians 2:10, in the same kind of knowing.

His reaction to it is the surprising part

Six verses in, David says what he makes of all this, and it is not what most people would say.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. (Psalm 139:6)

Too wonderful. Not: too invasive. Not: too much.

That is a person who has just described being completely known, down to the unsaid words, and whose reaction is a kind of awe. And I do not think that reaction is available to somebody who thinks of God as primarily an inspector, which means the psalm tells you something about the relationship as well as about the knowledge.

I cannot attain unto it. He is not claiming to understand the arrangement. He is describing it and then admitting it is above him, which is a much more honest place to leave it than a tidy conclusion.

You are inside a knowledge Scripture reacts to with wonder rather than with alarm. Psalm 139:6 calls it too wonderful for me, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:15, that a person receives the Spirit of adoption rather than the spirit of bondage again to fear.

Only two parties know a person's interior

Paul makes the same claim in a different register and it is worth putting beside the psalm.

For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. (1 Corinthians 2:11)

What man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him. Paul is granting the loneliness. He is saying, as a plain fact, that the interior of a person is not accessible to anybody else.

That is worth having said out loud, because a person whose thoughts have never been heard often assumes this is a defect in their life. Paul treats it as the ordinary condition of being a human being. Nobody's interior is available to anybody.

And then he uses that fact as an analogy for how the Spirit knows God, which puts the Spirit in the position of the one who has interior access.

You are inside the ordinary human condition rather than a defective version of it. 1 Corinthians 2:11 states the inaccessibility of a person's interior as a fact about everybody, and it is the Spirit of God, in that same verse, who is described as having that kind of access.

And the Spirit prays what cannot be said

The last piece is the practical one and it is aimed exactly at material that has never become words.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Romans 8:26)

Which cannot be uttered. Not: which are difficult to say. Which cannot be, which is the same category as the unsaid interior at the top of this article.

And the one doing it is not the person. The Spirit itself maketh intercession. Which means there is a prayer going up that consists of the exact material a person has never been able to form, and it is being formed by somebody else.

If the never having said it has become heavier than a loneliness, if it has reached the point where nobody knows anything real about you and you are not sure you want to be here, that is a thing to say out loud to a doctor, a counselor, a social worker, or a pastor you trust. In the United States the 988 crisis line is answered by a real person at any hour.

You have a prayer going up that is made of what you could never form. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit itself maketh intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, and it is that same Spirit named in the verse doing the forming rather than the person.