The Voice I Use With My Sister

It is the second sentence. Never the first.

The first one is fine. The first one is a normal adult woman saying hello to another normal adult woman, warm, glad, entirely genuine, because she does love her and that has never been in question.

Then her sister says something. It is usually nothing. It is a comment about the drive, or a small observation about the state of the kitchen, or one of those sentences that starts "I did wonder whether you had" and never finishes in a way anybody could complain about.

And out of her mouth, at forty-six, in her own house, with a tea towel in her hand, comes fourteen.

Not raised. That is the strange part and it has taken her years to see it. It does not get loud. It gets flat, and precise, and it puts a small extra pause before certain words, and if you recorded it and played it back to anybody who was in that house in 1993 they would identify the speaker in about two seconds.

Their mother is dead. The house was sold. The two of them are, by any measure, in a good place: they talk every week, they holiday together, her sister was the second person she called from the hospital both times.

And still, about every fifth conversation, fourteen turns up in the kitchen.

She has tried. That is what she would most want you to know. She has read things. She has gone into conversations with a plan, and the plan has survived, on a good day, until roughly the second sentence.

She has apologized twice, both times awkwardly, both times receiving a version of "don't be silly" which is its own kind of door closing.

She is not in crisis about it. It is one small thing in a good life. But there is a private verdict she has reached about it somewhere in the last decade, and the verdict is: that is just what I am like with her, and it is not going to change.

Nobody is asking you to try harder

I want to take one thing off the table immediately, because I suspect it is the reason you have half braced since the first paragraph.

There is no technique coming.

Nothing on this page is going to hand you a better plan for the second sentence, or a phrase to use, or a breathing thing, or a way of noticing the flat voice before it arrives. Not because those are contemptible, but because you have tried them for a decade with an intelligent and honest effort, and a page that offers you a slightly cleverer version of what has already failed is not help, it is another thing to fail at.

So put that down.

Here is what I want to put in its place, and it is not a strategy, it is a fact about your inside.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

Notice who does everything in that sentence. Five verbs, and all five of them belong to God. I will give. I will put. I will take away. I will give. The person receiving is not assigned a single action.

That is not an accident of translation. It is the whole point of the passage, and it is the reason it has been read at every serious moment in the church's history: because the thing being described is not a self-improvement project.

You have been given a heart of flesh and a new spirit within you, and that is not encouragement, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the verdict rather than being received as a verse you have heard.

Now let me say something about the flat voice, because I think you have misidentified what it is.

It is not a character trait. It is a groove. A fourteen-year-old girl in a house in 1993 worked out a way of speaking that kept her safe in a particular kind of exchange, and it worked, and things that work get repeated, and after thirty years of repetition it is not a decision any more. It is a road.

And you have been treating the presence of the road as evidence that nothing has been done in you. That is the bit that has to go, and it has to go first, because the verdict is doing more damage than the voice.

You are not a woman in whom nothing happened. A groove worn into a hillside over thirty years does not disappear because the water changed course, and the presence of the groove says nothing whatsoever about where the water is going now. Scripture says the heart of stone was taken and a heart of flesh given, and the Spirit of God is the one who was put within you, and neither of those was ever conditional on a kitchen conversation going well.

I want to say something about the two apologies, too.

You apologized twice, awkwardly, and got "don't be silly" both times. You are the only person in that relationship who has ever named this out loud, and you did it twice, at cost, and it was not received, and you kept loving her anyway and phoned her from the hospital both times.

That is not the behavior of a stony heart. Scripture says what was given, and the Spirit is the evidence, and a woman who apologizes for a tone of voice her sister has never once acknowledged is a woman with flesh where the stone used to be.

And here is the last of it. You are new, and fourteen is a road and not a resident. The word settles it. The Spirit is the seal. And that voice is not who lives in that kitchen, whatever it sounds like at about the fifth conversation.