Asked To Give It A Rest

It was one conversation, it lasted about ninety seconds, it was seven years ago, and Douglas has been obeying it ever since.

The friend was not being unkind. That has to be first, because Douglas would insist on it and he would be right. They were in a car. It had been a long day. She said something like: can we not, just for tonight.

That was it. That was the whole thing. She did not say never. She did not say you are too much, or that she minded generally, or that anybody else had said anything. She was tired, in a car, at the end of a day, and she asked for one evening off.

He said of course, and meant it, and they talked about something else, and it was a perfectly good evening.

And he has not raised it with her since.

Seven years. With a friend he sees most weeks. A request about one evening has been running as a standing order, and he has never once tested it, and she has almost certainly forgotten the conversation entirely.

He worked this out at a wall, over a garden, talking to a neighbor who had asked him a straightforward question, and finding that his answer to a stranger was fuller than anything he had said to a woman he has known for twenty years.

He stood there afterwards feeling slightly ill.

Now, the interesting part is not that he obeyed a request. That is what decent people do. The interesting part is the sizing.

She asked for an evening. He gave her a decade. And in the gap between what was asked and what he handed over, something else has been living.

You have your own version. Somebody said something once, reasonably, about one occasion, and you have been serving the sentence ever since, and it is very likely that they do not know they passed one.

Nobody here is going to tell you she was wrong to ask. She was not.

But it is worth finding out how long the sentence was, because you may have been adding to it yourself for years.

The instruction is a job description, not a temperament

There is a line Paul writes to a young man he is handing things over to, and the phrase in the middle of it settles this.

But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.2 Timothy 4:5

Do the work of an evangelist.

Notice what that is not. It is not be an evangelist, as a type of person, with a personality attached. It is a work, listed alongside other works, given as an instruction about activity.

And notice who it is given to. Timothy, by all the evidence in those letters, was not a bold man. He is told elsewhere not to be timid, told to take a little wine for his stomach, told not to let people despise his youth. If there is one figure in the New Testament who was not naturally the person at the table who brings it up, it is him.

And he is told to do the work anyway, because the work is a work and not a temperament.

And what you carry is a function rather than a character flaw. That is not my framing: the written word puts it in a list of things to do rather than in a description of a kind of person, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man who has been treating himself as an inconvenience for seven years.

And you are not required to be less of yourself to be bearable. The word says we are His workmanship, and the workmanship language puts the making in His hands rather than in the reactions of the people around you, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are.

What the sentence was actually for

Here is the part that matters more than the verse, and it is about the seven years rather than the ninety seconds.

A request about one evening cannot sustain a decade on its own. It needs help. And the help has come from Douglas, every week, in small quantities, because the standing order has been doing something useful for him.

It has been protecting him from finding out.

As long as he does not raise it, he does not have to discover whether she would sigh. The sentence, which began as her request, has been maintained by him because it removes a risk, and it removes it every single week, and that is a very reliable payoff for a very small cost.

That is not cowardice. It is ordinary, and almost everybody does some version of it, and naming it is not an accusation.

And you are able to find out. Not once you are braver: the word says perfect love casteth out fear, and the Holy Spirit is entirely able to make an ordinary conversation with a twenty year friend a thing a person can risk rather than manage.

And her patience with you is not a finite resource you have been rationing. The word says charity suffereth long and is kind, and that is written about the ordinary love between believers rather than about God only, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real thing to expect from a friendship of twenty years.

Nobody is telling you to go and test it tonight

I want to be plain, because this is where a message like this sends somebody into a conversation with a chip on their shoulder.

Do not go and raise it in order to see what happens. That is a test, and she will feel it, and it will go badly for reasons that have nothing to do with the subject.

And do not go and apologize for seven years of silence, which would put her in the position of having to reassure you about something she does not remember.

There is nothing to do about the friendship tonight. The friendship is fine.

What is available is smaller: knowing that the sentence was ninety seconds long and that everything after it has been yours, and letting that be true without doing anything with it yet.

And nothing about you needs managing. Nothing in Scripture asks anybody to hold themselves at a reduced setting to remain acceptable, and the Spirit of God has never once required a person to be smaller in order to be loved.