I Said It In Two Languages

You said it in the language your grandmother prayed in. You have lived it in the language you argue about the electric bill in.

And somewhere around the twelfth or fifteenth year, that stopped being a charming detail and became a genuine question that you have never asked out loud, because there is nobody obvious to ask.

Which one is the promise?

If the words that left your mouth that day were in one language, and the whole of your actual married life has run in another, is the promise sitting back there in a room you left, in a language you now use mostly on the phone to family?

And the second question underneath it, which is the one that actually hurts. If you are keeping it in the wrong language, does the keeping count?

I want to answer both of those properly. Not by telling you that language does not matter, because language matters enormously and you know that better than most people. By showing you who was listening, and what He speaks.

The one who finishes what concerns you

There is a line at the end of Psalm 138 that has been carrying me for years, and I want you to hear what it does and does not say.

The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me (Psalm 138:8, King James Version)

Perfect there means finish. Bring to completion. It is the language of a job being carried through to the end by somebody other than the person worrying about it.

And look at the scope of it. That which concerneth me. Not the parts of my life conducted in the correct register. The whole of what concerns me.

You are inside something being carried to completion by somebody else, and Psalm 138 has never once limited that to one language. Psalm 138:8 puts the finishing on the LORD across everything that concerns a person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that reach into two languages at once.

That matters more than it sounds. The One who is finishing this is not standing at a border checking which language a promise was filed in.

You have a promise in the hands of somebody who was present in both rooms, and He has never once needed a translation to understand what you said. The passage puts the completing of a life in His hands rather than ours, and the Spirit of God is the one who hears a vow in whichever language it was spoken in.

Two mouths, one promise

Let me take the division apart, because I think it is smaller than it looks from inside.

A promise is not a sound. The sound was the delivery mechanism. What you promised was a set of commitments about a life, and those commitments do not change shape when they cross a language.

I am not going anywhere. That sentence means precisely the same thing in every language on earth. The syllables change. The commitment does not.

So the version in your grandmother's language and the version you live in the kitchen are not two promises. They are one promise with two mouths, and you own both mouths.

You are keeping the same promise you made, and the change of language has never once made it a different one. Psalm 138:8 has the LORD carrying to completion the whole of what concerns a person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds two versions of a thing together as one.

And there is something else, which I say carefully because it is tender. The language you said it in is the language of the woman who said it. Of course it is. She was twenty three and she was in her mother's church.

The language you live in is the language of the woman keeping it. Both of those women are you.

You were the one in that church and you are the one in this kitchen, and no language has ever once separated a person from herself. It is written that He perfects what concerns us, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a life whole across a move, a marriage and a border.

Say it twice, on purpose

So here is the assignment, and it is the only one on this site that has two parts, and I want you to do both.

Alone, out loud, to God, say your vows in the language you made them in. All of it, or as much of it as remains.

Then say them again in the language you live in.

The written word puts the finishing of a whole life in His hands rather than in ours, and the Spirit of God is the one who hears both tongues without an interpreter. You have one promise reaching Him twice, and neither saying has ever once been the lesser of the two.

Do not translate as you go. Say the first one, stop, breathe, then say the second one as its own thing.

You will notice something while you do it, and I am not going to tell you what, because it is different for everybody and it is yours.

You are able to bring both halves of your own life into one room, and it has never once been a choice between them. Psalm 138:8 gives the finishing of everything that concerns a person to the LORD, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a kitchen when a woman says the same promise twice in two tongues.

And when you are done, do not decide which one was better. That is not the exercise and there is no answer.