I know I have one. I carry an especially heavy secret. It's weight varies, month to month and year to year, but lately it's been particularly heavy. I just want to dump part of it somewhere. Even a piece of paper could share enough of the load.
So I pick up my pencil and sit down to write it. I write barely the first letter of my terrible secret, when tears begin to roll down my face. I sob with shame as the tears fall on the notebook paper and the angry acid contained therein burn holes in the paper, erasing the letters I've already written.
I get no further. And the weight weighs heavier. But what if I could get farther? What if I could write it?
That notebook would become an unholy spot of desecration. I would be forever in fear of it falling...open or into the wrong hands and the shameful confessions being found and read.
I'd be ruined. Utterly ruined.
So I can't write. The guilt it would lay upon me to know that that terrible monster was recorded on a page somewhere would be far too terrible to bear. And I could never rip the page into small enough shreds to get rid of it. I could never burn it sufficiently.
I would carry the mark of what was written on my hands. It would feel visible to the whole world (guilt does that).
But if I keep it hidden in my heart, only God can see it. Only He knows that its there. And I know that He still loves me in spite of it. That He always will. He's the only one who will.
No ink for this then. Only silent prayers for relief and hot tears in the night.
Safety. Secrecy. Assurance.