The Friend Everybody Loves

Charmaine has never said a word about it and she has been carrying it for about six years.

The woman is genuinely lovely. That is not sarcasm and Charmaine would say it under oath. She is warm, she remembers birthdays, she turned up at the hospital for Charmaine's mother twice without being asked, and there are four people in that church who would say she is the reason they stayed.

And something in Charmaine has never settled about her.

Not a suspicion of anything specific. She could not name a single act. If you asked her what she thought this woman had done, she would have nothing at all, and she has interrogated herself about it enough times to be confident that it is not jealousy, because she has looked for that carefully and cannot find it and has no reason to have it.

It is just that when that woman is talking, something in Charmaine goes very slightly still and does not relax again until she moves on.

Six years.

And the loneliest part is not the unease. It is that everybody else is glad. She has watched her sister become close to this woman. She has heard her named from the front. There is no room in Charmaine's life where a person would understand the sentence she is not saying, and she has half concluded, more than once, that the problem must therefore be her.

She is fifty-one.

You may know that stillness.

Maybe there is somebody in your life that a whole room loves, and something in you does not, and you have no reason and no incident and nothing at all to point at, and you have started to wonder what that says about you.

The prayer that asks for both

There is a prayer of Paul's that puts two things together that almost nobody keeps together, and the fact that he asks for both at once is the whole point.

And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; That ye may approve things that are excellent.Philippians 1:9-10

Love abounding in knowledge and in all judgment.

He does not ask that their love be replaced by discernment, or that their discernment be softened by love. He asks that the love increase in judgement, as though judgement were the medium the love grows in rather than its opponent.

Which means the arrangement you have been living in for six years, where a person is either loved or perceived, is not the arrangement Paul prays for. He prays for both in the same chest at the same time about the same people.

And notice the purpose clause: that ye may approve things that are excellent. The point of the judgement is discrimination between goods, not the detection of villains. It is aimed at approving rather than exposing.

And you are able to love her and not settle about her at the same time. The written word asks for love abounding in all judgment as one prayer rather than two, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a livable arrangement in a woman who has felt like a hypocrite for six years.

And the unease is not a verdict you are required to reach. The word points the judgement at approving what is excellent, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than assigning you an investigation.

Nothing here confirms it

Let me be very plain, because this is the category where a careless article does real harm.

I am not telling you that you are right about her. I do not know her, I have never met her, and I have no way of assessing anything. Nothing in this piece is a confirmation.

I am also not telling you that you are wrong, or that six years of stillness is definitely your own material, because I do not know that either and it would be equally reckless.

What I can tell you is what the stillness is not. It is not a finding. It is not evidence. It cannot be used, it cannot be tested, and if it were said out loud to anybody it would function as an accusation without content, which is the most damaging thing this gift can produce and the reason the whole category exists.

The gift perceives. It does not prosecute. And a perception with no content is not one third of the way to a conclusion; it is a different kind of object entirely.

And nothing about you is under review for a stillness you have never once spoken. 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 half concluded she must be the problem.

What six years of holding has cost, and what it has bought

Now something practical, and it is a division.

The cost is real. You have been slightly braced in rooms for six years, and you have watched your sister become close to somebody while carrying a thing you cannot mention, and that is genuinely lonely.

But look at what the holding has bought.

Four people stayed at that church because of her. Your mother had two hospital visits. Your sister has a friend. Not one of those has been touched by your unease, because you have never said a word, and a woman who has held an unnameable thing for six years without letting it leak has done something considerably harder than most people manage in six months.

That is the gift operating correctly. It does not look like anything, which is exactly why nobody has ever congratulated you for it.

And you are permitted to go on holding it without a resolution. The word says a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards, and the Spirit is the one who makes indefinite holding a competence rather than a failure to act.

And what you see is for how you pray rather than for what you say. The word says pray one for another, and the Spirit is the one who gives a six year stillness somewhere to go that harms nobody.