Soul Signal

By Dan Tracy, Soul Signal

For twenty two years I sat behind a radio console for the Kentucky State Police, taking calls from folks on the worst night of their life. A wreck on the parkway. A house fire with kids inside. A man standing on a bridge who called it in himself. You learn real quick in that job that your voice has got to stay level no matter what’s happening in your chest. You keep your breathing even. You keep the shake out of your words. Then the call ends, you log it, and the next one comes in thirty seconds later, and you do it again.

Nobody teaches you what to do with all that after the shift’s over. So mostly you don’t do anything with it. You swallow it. You go home, you eat supper, you tell your wife it was a slow night, and you carry every one of those calls around inside you like rocks in a coat pocket, one at a time, year after year, until you’re an old man wondering why your chest feels so heavy all the time and you can’t rightly say why.

I didn’t understand for a long time that keeping all that buried wasn’t the same thing as it being gone. I just thought I was being strong. Come to find out later, there’s an old text that could have told me different, if anybody’d handed it to me back then.

A Saying Buried in a Jar

Out in the Egyptian desert, in that same jar of old writings that got dug up near Nag Hammadi back in 1945, there’s a little book called the Gospel of Thomas. Ain’t got no story to it, no manger, no cross, just a list of things Jesus is said to have told folks, one after another. Saying number seventy is short, plain, and it’ll stop you if you let it. It goes something like this.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Read that twice. It ain’t talking about sin the way we usually mean it. It’s talking about the stuff you’re carrying inside that you never let out into the light of day.

The Word That Means More Than “Say It”

Now here’s where I want to slow down, because there’s a word doing more work in that saying than it looks like at first glance.

We hear “bring forth” and we think it just means “speak up” or “let it out,” like you’re confessing something. But the word behind that phrase, going back to the Greek this text likely came from before it landed in Coptic, carries the sense of bringing something to birth. Not just saying a thing out loud. Birthing it. Like a mother carrying a child, and there comes a day that child has got to come out into the world whether anybody’s ready or not.

Think on that a minute. A birth ain’t quiet and it ain’t easy and it ain’t quick. It’s work. It’s pain before it’s relief. Nobody births a child by whispering about it once and going back to bed. You labor it out.

That’s what this saying is asking of you. Not “mention it sometime if it’s convenient.” Labor it out. Whatever’s inside you, the grief, the doubt, the thing you saw that you never told a soul, the calling you’ve been ignoring, the truth about yourself you’ve been circling around for years, it wants to be born. And if you won’t do the work of birthing it, that saying tells you plain, it don’t just sit there quiet and harmless. It turns on you.

What I Was Carrying and Didn’t Know It

I spent four years in the diaconate formation program with the Roman Catholic Church, studying to serve, thinking that was my calling. And the whole time, there was a set of questions growing inside me that I kept shoving back down every time they surfaced. Questions about what I was really being taught. Questions about whether the map they’d handed me matched the actual territory of what Jesus said. I’d feel one of those questions rise up during a class or a prayer, and I’d tell myself, not now, that’s doubt talking, push it back down.

I did that for years. I thought keeping the doubt quiet was the same as keeping my faith strong. It wasn’t. It was just me stacking up rocks in that same coat pocket I’d been filling since my dispatcher days, except this time the rocks were questions instead of car wrecks.

By year four, I couldn’t hold the weight of it no more. Everything I’d been refusing to bring forth came up at once, and it about tore me apart for a season. I want to be honest about that part. It wasn’t gentle. Birth ain’t gentle. But on the other side of it was the beginning of my whole spiritual awakening, the thing that eventually led me to sharing what I’ve learned with all of you.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t understand then. If I’d have kept swallowing those questions the rest of my life, they wouldn’t have politely gone away and let me rest easy in a robe somewhere. They’d have destroyed something in me slow, the same way all them uncalled calls sat in my chest for twenty two years, quiet on the outside and eating at me on the inside the whole time.

What you don’t bring forth don’t disappear. It just waits on you in the dark, and it grows teeth while it’s waiting.

It Ain’t Just the Big Things

Now I ain’t saying every person reading this has got some giant secret sitting on them like I did. Sometimes it’s smaller than that, and just as heavy. Maybe it’s a gift you’ve got that you’ve never let yourself use because somebody once told you it wasn’t practical. Maybe it’s forgiveness you know you need to give somebody, or ask somebody for, and you keep telling yourself there’s time later. Maybe it’s just the plain truth of how you’re really doing, that you keep answering “fine” to, when fine ain’t the word at all.

Whatever it is, that old saying from the desert is telling you the same thing it told me. That thing inside you not being said, not being lived out, not being birthed into the light where it can breathe, that ain’t a neutral thing. It’s either going to save you or it’s going to destroy you. There ain’t a shelf where you can set it down forever and it just stays put, harmless.

Bringing It Forth

I ain’t got a tidy way to end this, because bringing something forth is never as clean as the person telling the story makes it sound. It’s messy. It takes longer than you want it to. But I can tell you it’s better than the alternative, which is carrying it quiet until it finds its own way out anyhow, usually at a worse time and in a worse way than if you’d have done the work yourself.

The Kingdom that Jesus kept pointing at, the one that’s within you and not off in some building or behind some door, it ain’t a finished thing sitting pretty and waiting on you to notice it. Some of it has still got to be birthed. Labored out. Brought forth, on purpose, even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard.

So here’s what I want to ask you plain. What’s the thing inside you right now that you’ve been refusing to bring forth? What have you been calling “fine” that ain’t fine at all? I’d love to hear it, even just a piece of it, in the comments here or wherever you found your way to me. You don’t have to birth the whole thing out loud today. Sometimes just naming that it’s there is the first push.

Dan Tracy
Soul Signal