I Wish I Had Not Been Shown

Iona got it four years ago and she has never once been glad of it.

That is the sentence she has never said out loud, because of how it sounds. Every framework she has ever been handed treats these things as gifts, and a person who says I wish I had not been given this sounds ungrateful at best.

She is not ungrateful. She is tired.

What she was shown concerned a family she is close to, and it was not something she could act on, and it was not something anybody wanted to hear, and it was not something she could unsee. She has sat at their table probably a hundred times since, and she loves them, and she has held it the entire time.

And every single time something happens in that family, she has an extra layer of interpretation running that nobody else in the room has, and it is exhausting in a way she cannot explain to anybody because explaining it would require telling them.

She has prayed about it. She has asked, more than once, to be relieved of it, in about those words.

She is forty-four.

And the thing that has grown alongside the tiredness, which she likes even less, is a small persistent wish that it had gone to somebody else. Somebody sturdier. Somebody who would have known what to do with it, or who would at least have been able to put it down between Tuesdays.

You may know that wall.

Maybe you have something you never asked for either. Maybe you have also wished, quietly, that it had landed on somebody else. And maybe you have never said that where anybody could hear it, because you know how the sentence sounds.

The verse that does not pretend

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that is unusually blunt about the cost of knowing things, and it is a relief precisely because it does not soften.

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.Ecclesiastes 1:18

Read it as a plain statement of arithmetic, which is how it is written.

More knowing, more sorrow. Not as punishment, not as a warning against learning, and not as a reason to stop. As a description of what happens to a person who knows more than they did.

And nobody in that book apologizes for it or explains it away or attaches a bright clause to the end.

Which means the tiredness you have been carrying for four years is not evidence that you have handled this badly. It is the documented cost of the thing itself, written down by somebody who had a great deal of it and said so.

And what you are feeling is the stated cost rather than your failure to cope. The written word puts sorrow and knowledge in a direct proportion without one word of apology, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been quietly ashamed of being tired.

And you are allowed to find this heavy. The word never once describes knowing as light, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring gratitude before it will sit with you.

The wish

Now let me take up the thing you like least about yourself in this, and I am not going to correct it.

You wish it had gone to somebody else.

That wish is in Scripture, repeatedly, and it is in the mouths of people God was not disappointed with. Moses asks to be relieved of a people he cannot carry. Elijah asks to die under a tree after the biggest day of his ministry. Jeremiah says he will not speak any more in His name and then says he cannot stop.

Not one of those men is rebuked for the wish. Elijah is fed and allowed to sleep. Moses is given seventy others to share the weight. Jeremiah is left in the job and God goes on talking to him.

The wish is treated as information about how heavy a thing is, rather than as a character problem in the person carrying it.

And the wish is not ingratitude and it has not disqualified you. The word records the same wish in prophets and answers it with food and sleep and help rather than with reproach, and the Spirit is the one who makes that reach somebody who has never said it out loud.

And nothing about you is under review for four years of finding it hard. The word says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman at a table doing an extra layer of interpretation nobody else can see.

What has never been offered you

Here is the practical part, and it is the thing that has actually been missing.

You have carried this entirely alone for four years, and the reason is that the only way to share it seemed to be to tell the family, which you correctly will not do.

But those are not the only two options, and you have been living as though they were.

There are people who can hold a weight without needing its contents. A person who knows your life, who is safe, and who can be told I am carrying something about people I love, and I cannot tell you what it is, and it is heavy, and I need somebody to know that I am carrying it.

That is not breaking a confidence. Nothing about the family is disclosed. What is disclosed is the fact of the load, which is yours and not theirs.

Moses got seventy men. He did not have to hand over the burden's contents to be helped with its weight.

And you are permitted to be helped with the weight of it. The word says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, and it does not require the burden to be explained before it can be shared, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real option rather than a nice idea.