Every Option Costs Somebody

Ignacio has four options written on the back of an envelope and he has stopped looking for a fifth.

There is no fifth. He has looked for eleven weeks, at some cost to his sleep, and he now accepts what he suspected at the start, which is that the fifth option does not exist and that every one of the four takes something real from somebody he loves.

One of them is hardest on his mother. One is hardest on his youngest sister, who has had the hardest run of the three of them already and who would say nothing about it, which makes it worse. One costs his own family a great deal of money and about two years. One costs almost nothing to anybody except that everyone would know it was the coward's version, and he includes himself in everyone.

He is the one holding it. That was decided years ago without a meeting, the way these things are, and it was decided because he is the one who does not fall apart.

And here is what has happened to him over eleven weeks that he has not told his wife.

He has stopped praying about which one and started praying that one of them will turn out not to hurt anybody. He knows that is not a thing that can happen. He does it anyway, most nights, and it is the only prayer he has left about this.

He is forty-nine. There is a date coming when this will be decided by circumstances if he does not decide it first, and that date is in about five weeks, and part of him is waiting for it.

You may know that envelope.

Maybe yours is a parent, or a house, or a business with brothers in it. Maybe you are also the one who does not fall apart, and maybe you also found that out by being handed things.

I am not going to find you a fifth option

Let me be honest with you first, because you have had enough people be optimistic at you.

I do not have a fifth option. I do not know your family, I have not seen the envelope, and a stranger who invents a painless answer from this distance is doing you a disservice you would spot in about four seconds.

There may not be one. Some situations genuinely do not contain a cost-free path, and being told otherwise by somebody cheerful is one of the loneliest experiences available to a person in your position.

So I am not going to do that.

And I am not going to tell you which of the four to take. That is not what wisdom is and it is certainly not mine to hand out about your mother and your sister from here.

What I want to look at is the prayer you have been praying for eleven weeks, and the word Paul uses about how a decision settles in a chest.

The word is umpire

There is a line in Colossians and the verb in it is unusual enough that translators have argued about how to render it.

And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful.Colossians 3:15

Rule there is a word from the games. It means to act as umpire, to arbitrate, to make the call in a contested situation.

Which is a very specific picture and it is not the one people usually take from this verse. It is not describing a pleasant calm that descends on somebody who has made the right choice. It is describing a function: something that adjudicates when two things are in contention and there is no obvious winner.

That is your envelope exactly.

And notice what is not promised. Not that the peace makes the cost disappear. Not that the umpired option will feel good, or that anybody will be spared, or that you will be at ease afterwards. An umpire makes a call in a real contest where one side loses.

And you have an umpire and you were never meant to be one. The written word puts the arbitrating in the peace of God rather than in the man holding the envelope, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach somebody who has been the one who does not fall apart since he was about thirty.

And you are not required to find the option that hurts nobody. The word never once promises that, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring a painless answer before it will operate.

The prayer you have been praying

Now let me touch the eleven weeks of prayer, and I want to do it gently, because I do not think it is faithlessness and I do not think it is silly.

You have been asking for one of them to turn out not to hurt anybody.

That is a man trying to be spared the part of this that is actually unbearable, which is not the difficulty of the choice. It is that whichever way he moves, somebody he loves is going to carry something, and he will have been the one who put it on them.

That is the weight. Not the decision. The authorship.

And I am not going to lift that off you with a sentence, because it is real and it is yours and it is part of what being the one who holds things means.

What I will say is that you have been carrying the authorship as though it were the whole of the moral situation, and it is not. There is a difference between a man who chooses to hurt somebody and a man who allocates an unavoidable cost as fairly as he can. Everybody knows that difference about other people. Almost nobody grants it to themselves.

And you are not the author of the situation, only of the response to it. The word says every man shall bear his own burden, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hand back a weight that belongs to circumstances rather than to him.

And nothing about you is under review for the eleven weeks. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has been praying the same impossible prayer since June.