The Man In The Middle Carrying Messages

He rings on the Tuesday and tells him the whole thing.

She rings on the Wednesday and tells him hers.

Neither of them ever asks him to pass anything on. That is the part that took him longest to notice. Nobody has ever said, would you tell her. They simply tell him, at length, and then both of them go about their week knowing exactly what he is going to do.

And he does it. Softened. Tidied. With the worst bits taken out and the one line that would help put in a little more prominently than it was actually said.

Three years of this.

He is good at it. That is not a boast and it is not nothing. Two people who cannot be in a building together have both, for three years, known roughly how the other one is, and that is entirely because of him, and it has probably prevented something.

He is also tired in a way he cannot explain to anybody, because on paper he has done nothing. He has made some phone calls. He is not the one who lost anything. He is not entitled to be tired.

Here is the thing he worked out in the car last week and has not been able to put down since.

As long as he keeps doing this, they never have to.

He has thought of himself for three years as the bridge.

He is not the bridge. He is the reason there is no bridge. Every message he carries is a conversation that does not need to happen, and he has been quietly, lovingly, exhaustingly removing the pressure that might otherwise have made two people pick up a phone.

If you have been carrying somebody else's messages, sit down and have some tea. Nobody at this table is going to ask you to pass anything on.

Four words in the middle of a proverb

There is a proverb about getting involved in other people's quarrels, and the whole weight of it sits on a short phrase most readers go straight past.

He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears.Proverbs 26:17

Belonging not to him.

That is the qualification, and it is doing all the work. The proverb is not against peacemaking, and it is not against caring. It is about a specific position: a person who has taken hold of a strife that was never allocated to them.

And the picture is exact. A man with a dog by the ears is not fighting. He is holding on, with both hands, in a position he cannot maintain and cannot safely let go of, and he did not start any of it.

That is a description of tiredness with nothing to show for it.

You are holding a strife that was never allocated to you, and the tiredness with nothing to show for it is in the proverb. Proverbs 26:17 puts belonging not to him at the center of the sentence and pictures a man holding on rather than fighting, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that image in the book for people who mean well, which means three years of being unable to explain your own exhaustion has a verse under it.

The carrying is love, and it is still not yours

Now let us be fair to the three years, because there is a cruel reading of this available and it is not the true one.

What you have done is love. Two people have been kept in some kind of contact who would otherwise have had none, and that is not a small thing, and if either of them were ill tomorrow the other one would find out, and that is because of you. Nobody is calling the last three years a mistake.

You have been doing a real work of love, and putting it down is not the same as withdrawing it. Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another's burdens, and two verses later says every man shall bear his own burden, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept both of those in the same short passage without treating them as a contradiction, which means there is a burden that is properly shared and a burden that is properly somebody's own, and telling them apart is the whole skill.

What the car park realization actually means

Here is the hard part, said plainly, and then it will be handled gently.

As long as you carry it, they do not have to.

That is true. It is also not a verdict on you, and it is not a reason to feel that three years were wasted or wrong.

You were not obstructing anything, and no one is being told tonight that a family stayed apart because of a man who kept ringing them. 1 Corinthians 13:7 says charity beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, and it is written of love that carries more than its share rather than of love that calculates correctly, and it is the same Spirit who works that love in a person, which means the impulse that has driven three years of phone calls came from the right place.

What has changed is only that you now know something you did not know before. Knowing it does not make the past wrong. It changes what tomorrow is.