Something In Somebody I Love

Bethan noticed it about five months ago and there is nowhere on earth to put it.

It is not a suspicion of anything. She wants that understood, and it matters, because the moment a person says I have a feeling about somebody in my house everybody starts filling in blanks and the blanks they fill in are always the worst ones.

It is nothing like that. It is that something has changed in a person she has known for a very long time, and she cannot name the change, and nobody else in the family has said a word about it.

She has done all the ordinary things. She has asked, in the ordinary way, whether they are all right. She has got the ordinary answer. She has been available in the ways you are available, and made the meals, and left the doors open, and none of it has produced anything, and she was not expecting it to.

And so she is left holding a thing at the closest possible range with no way to act on it and nobody to describe it to.

Her sister is the obvious person and is exactly the wrong one, because her sister loves this person too and would go straight to worry, and worry in a family travels faster than anything.

Her friend from work would be safe and would not understand.

And a pastor would want specifics, reasonably, and she has none.

She is thirty-eight. It is five months. And what she has actually been doing, without ever deciding to, is watching, which is the only thing available and which is not a good long-term state for a person to be in.

You may know that kitchen.

Maybe there is somebody in your house too. Maybe you have also run through the list of people you could tell and found that every one of them is wrong for a different reason.

Four verbs for the meantime

There is a line in the love chapter that is usually read as a description of how patient love is, and it is more useful than that. It is a list of what love actually does during the period when nothing is known.

Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.1 Corinthians 13:7

Four verbs, and every one of them is an action rather than a mood.

Beareth. Carries. Takes the weight of a thing rather than putting it down or handing it on.

Believeth. Holds the most generous reading available that the evidence permits, which is not naivety, because you have no evidence and the generous reading is therefore as well supported as any other.

Hopeth. Faces forward. Does not settle the story in advance.

Endureth. Stays. Keeps making the meals and leaving the doors open, over months, without requiring a result.

Read that list against your five months and notice that you have been doing all four of them. Not as a strategy. As the only thing available. And a person doing all four of those at the closest range in a family is not being passive; that is the most active thing in the chapter.

And what you have been doing for five months is named in Scripture as what love does. The written word gives four verbs for exactly this period and every one of them is a thing you have been doing, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who thinks she has been merely watching.

And you are not required to resolve it in order to be doing right by them. The word describes love enduring rather than concluding, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than asking you for a finding.

Watching is the danger and it is not the same as bearing

Now let me separate two things that look identical from inside, because you named one of them yourself and were right to be uneasy.

Bearing carries the weight and keeps the person in view as a person.

Watching narrows. It starts collecting. It reads the ordinary as data, and once that begins, an entirely normal evening becomes a set of readings, and the person stops being somebody you live with and becomes a situation you are monitoring.

You have been in the second one at least some of the time. You know that, which is why the word watching came to you.

That is not a betrayal and it is what any attentive person does when they have something they cannot act on. It is also the thing to keep an eye on over the next five months, because at close range it is corrosive to the relationship it is trying to protect.

And you are able to carry it without collecting. The word puts bearing and believing in the same sentence, which means the carrying is meant to happen alongside the generous reading rather than instead of it, and the Spirit is the one who supplies that combination.

And nothing about you is under review for five months of not knowing what to do. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has run out of people to tell.

What is actually available

Three things, and none of them is a confrontation.

The first is that you can keep doing the four verbs, which you have been doing, and which is the substance of the assignment rather than the waiting room before it.

The second is that there is a category of person you have not considered: somebody who knows neither of you well, who is safe, and who can hold the fact of a load without its contents. Not for advice. So that one other human being on earth knows you are carrying something. That is available and it breaks nothing.

And the third is the ordinary thing, said again, without weight on it. Not a specialized question. Not a probe. Just the same ordinary availability you have been offering, offered again next week, which is exactly what enduring means and which most people stop doing at about month three.

And you can go on being available without requiring it to produce anything. The word says charity endureth all things and does not attach a term to the enduring, and the Spirit is the one who makes month six as possible as month one.