It Would Not Be Safe

If it was only him, he would be up that road in the morning.

He wants that understood before anything else in this article. He put his own down years ago. Whatever he had in it is gone, and it went quietly and without a scene, and he could sit at a table with that man tomorrow and eat his dinner and mean it.

It is not only him.

There is somebody in his house who would pay for it, and this article is not going to describe how, and it does not need to, and if you are the man this is written for you already know exactly what the sentence means.

So he does not go.

Here is the position that puts him in, and he has never once been able to say it out loud.

The short version sounds like a man holding out.

That is what it looks like from outside, and there is no way to correct it, because the correction requires the long version, and the long version is not his to tell. It belongs to somebody else in that house, and telling it to make himself look better would be a straight trade of their privacy for his reputation.

So people think what people think, and he lets them.

Somebody said something at a wedding in the spring. About how life is short, and how you never know, and how nothing is worth years.

He meant it kindly. He had no idea. He would be horrified.

And this man said aye, and finished his drink, and went and stood outside for about ten minutes.

If you are keeping a distance for somebody else's sake, come and lean on this gate. There is a flask and nobody out here is going to tell you life is short.

Where prudence sits in the book

There is a proverb about seeing trouble coming, and the striking thing is which side of the sentence the hiding is on.

A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished.Proverbs 22:3

Foreseeth, and hideth himself.

That is the commended half. The man who sees what is coming and keeps out of the way of it is the prudent one, and he is set against the simple, who walk on into it and pay for it.

There is no suggestion anywhere in that verse that the hiding is timidity. It is a skill. It requires seeing accurately, judging the weight of what you are looking at, and then acting on it when nobody else can see what you can see.

You are doing what Scripture calls prudence and it is on the commended side of the proverb. Proverbs 22:3 puts foreseeing and hiding together as the wise course and sets the alternative down as simplicity, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it in a book of wisdom rather than in a warning about fear, which means four years of a distance kept for somebody else's protection has a verse under it.

What it costs to be unable to explain

Now the actual weight, because it is not the distance and it never was.

The distance is manageable. You made that decision, it was right, and you would make it again this afternoon.

What is heavy is being read wrongly by everybody and being unable to say a word about it, because the only correction available would cost somebody who has already paid enough.

That is a specific kind of loneliness and it does not have a name in ordinary conversation.

You have been paying for somebody else's privacy with your own reputation, and that transaction has been seen every time it happened. Matthew 6:4 says that thine alms may be in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly, and it is written of things done where nobody can see them being credited by somebody who can, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things, which means every wedding you have stood outside of has had a witness.

Nobody is being summoned, and nobody is being sent

Let us be completely plain, because a man in your position needs to hear it from the page rather than infer it.

Nobody here is telling you to go. Nothing in this article suggests that a table should be sat at when sitting at it would put somebody at risk, and no version of reconciliation that costs somebody their safety is being asked of anybody on this site.

You are not failing at anything.

You are not being instructed to reach anybody, and the guarding you are doing is not an obstacle to anything. Romans 12:18 says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, and it puts if it be possible into the sentence deliberately, and it is the same Spirit who gives wisdom to anybody who asks for it, which means the limit you are living inside is written into the verse itself.