She Has Never Said It Broke

They say things like since everything happened.

They say that time. They say it went the way it went, and everybody in that family knows precisely what that means and nobody has ever needed it explained.

In six years, she has never once heard anybody use the word broke.

And she has never said it either, and she is the one who was actually there when it happened.

Here is how it works in that family, and it is not written down anywhere and it does not need to be.

Naming a thing is the first move of an argument.

If you say the word out loud, you are understood to be opening a subject, and opening a subject means somebody is going to have to say what they think, and once people say what they think in that family there are consequences that last years.

So nobody names it. And because nobody names it, everybody talks around it, and after six years the going around has become so practiced that it is almost graceful.

Here is the part that has begun to sit on her.

She is not protecting anybody.

Everybody knows. There is not one person in that family who is unaware of what happened, or who would be shocked, or who needs shielding from information.

What is being protected is a room, for about four seconds, from a silence.

And the cost of protecting those four seconds is six years of every conversation having a hole in the middle of it that everybody steers round.

If there is a word nobody in your family will use, come and get a coffee. Nobody in this hall is opening anything.

Where the rending is filed

There is a passage everybody knows, and the thing worth noticing is which list the hard items are in.

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.Ecclesiastes 3:7

Read where those sit. They are in a list of seasons under heaven, alongside planting and harvesting and being born.

They are not in a list of sins. They are not in a list of failures, or of things that should not have happened, or of moments where somebody is at fault. The rending is filed with the sowing and the reaping, as a thing that occurs in the world, described without blame.

And then the second pair, which is the one for you. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

Both are seasons. Neither is ranked above the other. Which means silence is legitimate and it is also not permanent, and Scripture does not treat the end of a silence as a betrayal of the silence.

You are permitted to name a rending without opening a case, because Scripture files the rending with the seasons rather than with the faults. Ecclesiastes 3:7 puts a time to rend beside a time to sew and a time to keep silence beside a time to speak, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept them in a list about seasons under heaven, which means saying the word out loud has never been the first move of an argument in the book that word comes from.

What the family rule actually is

Now the rule, because it deserves to be looked at rather than simply obeyed.

The rule is: naming equals arguing.

That rule was true once. It was probably formed in a real moment, years before any of this, when somebody named something and an argument did follow, and everybody present learned it and passed it on.

But a rule made from one occasion is not a law of nature. It is a habit with a good reason behind it, and habits can be examined without anybody being disloyal.

You are able to separate the naming from the case, and no rule in your family has ever had authority over what is simply true. John 8:32 says ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free, and it puts the knowing before the freedom rather than after any negotiation, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Spirit of truth, which means a plain fact said plainly is on the side of freedom and not on the side of strife.

Six years of going round

Here is what the going round has actually cost, said gently.

Every conversation in that family for six years has had a shape dictated by a hole. Not by anybody's opinion about the hole. By the requirement that nobody mention it.

That has taken energy from every single person, including the ones who think they are fine.

You have been carrying a shape in every conversation, and the tiredness of that is real and has never been named either. Psalm 32:3 says when I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long, and it is written of the physical cost of an unspoken thing rather than of a moral failure, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things, which means what six years has taken out of you has been noticed even though nobody in that family has mentioned it.