About My Own Family

Nainoa got it about somebody he eats with four times a week and there is nowhere to put it.

That is the difficulty and it is not the same difficulty as the one everybody writes about. He has held things about people at church for years and it has been fine; he writes them down, he prays, he waits, and the waiting is easy because he sees those people on a Sunday and then goes home.

This one is in his house on Thursdays.

So there is no waiting. There is only sitting at a table with somebody, passing things, hearing about their week, watching them be entirely ordinary, while a thing sits in him that he cannot act on and cannot forget and cannot stop being aware of for one single minute of the evening.

And what has happened over about eight months is that he has become slightly odd with them. Not distant. He would say the opposite, and that is the problem: he has become watchful in a way he never used to be, kinder in a way that is very slightly performed, and about four times he has asked a question that was not quite a normal question.

They have not noticed. He is fairly sure of that. But he has noticed, and he now cannot tell whether his own behavior is love or surveillance.

He is forty-five.

You may know that table.

Maybe yours is a brother, a daughter, a parent. Maybe you have also found that carefulness is easy at a distance and nearly impossible at a range of four feet on a Thursday.

The word is concealeth, and it is not shameful

There is a proverb that contrasts two ways of carrying something, and the second half of it is the one nobody quotes.

A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.Proverbs 11:13

He that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.

Concealment is usually a suspect word, and in that sentence it is the virtue. It is set directly against talebearing, and the person doing it is described by their spirit rather than by their caution: faithful.

Which means the eight months of not saying anything is not you failing to act. It is the thing the proverb names as the honorable option, done by somebody whose spirit is being described approvingly while they do it.

And notice that the proverb does not offer a third path where the matter gets handled and everybody is comfortable. There are two options in that sentence and you are already in the good one.

And the holding is the faithful thing rather than the avoidance of the faithful thing. The written word puts concealing beside a faithful spirit and against talebearing, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been sitting at a table for eight months.

And you have not been failing to do something. The word gives the concealer the approving description, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than waiting for an announcement.

Why proximity makes it harder

Now let me name the actual mechanism, because you have been experiencing it without having a word for it, and having the word helps.

Distance does most of the work of carefulness.

When you hold something about a person you see once a week, the natural gaps in the relationship do the containing for you. You are not with them. There is nothing to manage.

At four feet on a Thursday there are no gaps, so the containment has to be done actively, every minute, by you. And active containment leaks into behavior, because a man concentrating on not being different is being different.

That is the whole of what has happened. It is not a character failure and it is not evidence that the thing has corrupted you. It is what happens when a task that is normally done by circumstances has to be done by a person instead.

And you are not corrupt, you are working without the help that distance gives. The word says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and the Spirit is the one who makes that mercy rather than an assessment of a man at a dinner table.

And nothing about you is under review for four slightly odd questions. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to somebody who has been auditing his own kindness for its motives.

Love or surveillance

Now the question you cannot answer, and I do not think you should keep trying to answer it by introspection, because you will get the same result you got on the last four attempts.

Here is a better test and it is external.

Surveillance narrows. It looks for confirmation, it notices the things that fit, and it gets more specific over time.

Love widens. It notices things that have nothing to do with the matter at all. It is glad about a thing that is entirely unrelated. It remembers something they said about work.

Look at the last eight Thursdays and ask which direction your attention has been moving. Not what you felt. What you noticed.

If half of what you have registered about that person in eight months has nothing to do with the thing, you are fine, and the watchfulness is the ordinary cost of holding something at close range.

And you are able to love somebody while holding something about them. The word says charity beareth all things and hopeth all things, and bearing is a word for carrying rather than for putting down, and the Spirit is the one who supplies that at four feet on a Thursday.

And what you are given is for helping somebody. The word puts the profiting in the other person, and the Spirit is the one who aims a thing that has been sitting in a man for eight months with nowhere to go.