It Would Look Like I Was Leaving Them

His mother has a phrase and it is not aimed at him and it lands on him every time.

She says it about other families. She says it about a woman two streets over whose son moved away and did something, and she says it in a particular tone, and the phrase is and now he does not know who he is.

She is not being cruel. She loves that woman. She brings her food. But that phrase has been in that kitchen for about nine years, and he has heard it perhaps forty times, and every one of the forty has been a small door closing.

He is thirty-eight.

He came to faith at twenty-six, quietly, in a way that involved nobody in his family, and he has never made an announcement and has never been asked to. He prays. He reads on his phone in a break room. He has been going to a room on the other side of the city for six years and he has told nobody at home, and his family assume he works Sundays, which is true about half the time.

It is not that they would throw him out. He would want that understood immediately, because that is the version people expect and it is not this.

It is worse in a quieter way. They would be wounded. His mother would say nothing at all, which is her method, and there would be a stiffness that would take about two years to go, and his father would ask him one question about respect that he would not be able to answer well, and his youngest sister, who tells him everything, would find out from somebody else and would be hurt about that specifically.

So the step he has been thinking about for four years is not a step he has been avoiding out of fear of himself.

He has been protecting six people, one of whom is old.

And what he cannot see any way around is that the asking is public. You cannot ask for a thing like this quietly. Somebody would have to be told, and then somebody else, and it would reach that kitchen inside two weeks, and it would arrive as a sentence in his mother's mouth about a man who does not know who he is.

Nobody here is indicting your family

I want to establish something and then keep it in view the whole way, because you are going to be watching for it.

Nothing on this page criticizes your mother.

Not the phrase, which she says about somebody else and not about you. Not her method, which is silence, and which is how a great many people of her generation carry a hurt. Not your father's question about respect, which is a real question and has a real answer that neither of us is going to be able to give in nine minutes. Not one of the six.

Anybody who handles this by making your family the obstacle has not understood your life, and you would close the page inside a paragraph, and you would be right to.

So let us leave them entirely alone and talk about you, who has been standing in a very lonely place for four years and has told nobody at all.

Because that is the actual subject. Not the step. The loneliness of the position you are in while you consider it.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains.Psalm 68:6

I want you to sit on the word solitary, because it is an odd word to be true of a man who eats at a table with six people every week.

But it is the right word, and you know it is. Solitary is not the same as alone. A man can be solitary in a full kitchen, if there is a thing about him that nobody in the room has ever been told, and you have been that for twelve years.

And look at what God is said to do with such a person. He does not leave them solitary and comfort them in it. He sets them in families, which is an active verb about placement.

You are somebody God places in a family, and He has been doing it for twelve years, and that is not encouragement for a man in a break room, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the loneliness rather than on a psalm you may have read this month.

Now let me say the plain thing about the six years.

You have been going to a room on the other side of the city, on your own, most Sundays, for six years, and telling nobody.

You have been being placed into a family the whole time and have not been able to call it that. Scripture puts the setting in families in God's hands as something He does, and the Spirit of God is the one who has had you crossing a city every week for six years, which no man does out of habit.

I want to say something careful about the asking, because that is where you are stuck and it deserves a real answer rather than a warm one.

You are right that it is public. It is. I am not going to pretend a thing like this can be done in a way that nobody ever hears about, because that would be false and you would know it.

What I will say is that you do not have to solve the whole of it today, and that the next actual step is not the step you have been rehearsing. It is one conversation with one person, and the purpose of that conversation is not to arrange anything. It is so that you are not the only human being who knows what you have been carrying for four years.

Find one person. That is all I am going to say about the practical side, and I am going to stop there deliberately, because you know your family and your city and I know neither.

You are not being asked to choose between your mother and your God today, and Scripture does not put that choice in front of you on this page, and the Spirit is the one who has kept you honoring those six people for twelve years while carrying this alone.

You are somebody God sets in a family, and He has been doing it for twelve years across a city. The word says He sets the solitary in families as an act of His own, and the Holy Spirit is the reason a man crosses a city every Sunday and calls it nothing.