The One Who Still Brings It Up

Every year. Same table, same meal, roughly the same hour.

It is never an attack. That is what makes it so hard to describe to anybody who was not raised the way he was raised. It comes in sideways, folded into a story about something else, and it is usually said with affection. Half the table does not even notice it went past.

He notices. He has noticed for eleven years.

And here is what he has never told anybody: he starts bracing in the car. Somewhere around the last turn before the house, when the road goes narrow and the trees come over, his shoulders come up an inch and stay there until he is driving home again. Eleven years of an inch.

Now let me tell you about her, because she is not a monster and this message is not going to make her one.

She is his aunt. She raised three of her own and half of his cousins. She is the person who sat in a hospital corridor with his mother for two nights and would not go home. When his oldest was born she drove four hours with a car full of food and stayed a week and washed everything in the house.

She also cannot let this go, and he does not entirely know why. He suspects it cost her something at the time that nobody ever acknowledged. He suspects it is not really about him at all. He has never asked, because there is no version of that conversation that ends well at a family table, and because a part of him is afraid the answer is simpler and worse.

So it comes round every year, and he braces, and afterwards he sits in the car for a minute before he starts the engine.

I am not going to ask you what she brings up. Not one detail. This message runs on the bracing, not on the thing.

And I am not going to hand you a way to shut her down, either. You have probably worked out four of them already, at night, and every one of them ends with somebody crying and the table shorter next year.

There is something better than a line, and it is in a verse most people quote at half its length.

The verse has two clauses before it has an instruction

Everybody knows the second half of Romans 12:18. Almost nobody preaches the front of it, and the front of it is where the mercy is.

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.Romans 12:18

Two conditions, and then the command.

If it be possible. That clause admits, in Scripture, in writing, that there are situations where it is not. Paul does not pretend every table can be made calm. He builds the exception into the verse before he gives the instruction, which is the kindest piece of drafting in the whole chapter.

As much as lieth in you. That is a boundary line drawn straight across the middle of the situation. Your part is your part. Her part is hers. And the verse is careful to say that the command reaches exactly to the edge of what is in your hands and not one inch past it.

Then live peaceably with all men, which is now a doable thing rather than an impossible one, because it has been cut down to your own half of the table.

Here is what that does to eleven years of bracing. You are responsible for your half and you were never handed hers, and Romans 12:18 draws that line for you rather than leaving you to guess where it goes, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man put down a load he was carrying on somebody else's behalf.

Think about what the bracing actually is, because I do not think you have ever named it. It is not fear of her. You are a grown man and she is seventy one and there is no physical thing happening at that table.

The bracing is the sound of a man trying to control an outcome that is not in his half. You go up that road every year attempting, by sheer tension, to make somebody else not say something. That is a job nobody can do, and the verse never asked you to do it.

You have peace available to you at a table where the sentence still gets said, and Romans 12:18 puts the possibility clause in first so that a person in exactly your seat is not condemned by it, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for your aunt to change before He settles you.

Let me be careful here about her, because I meant it earlier.

Nothing in this makes her the trouble. She is a woman who has done a great deal of good in your family and who is carrying something of her own around this that you may never learn. She owes you nothing. She does not owe you a changed mind, she does not owe you a conversation, and she certainly does not owe you the year where she does not say it.

And you do not owe her a defense.